


The Nature of Man

by Smaragdina



Series: The Nature of Man [1]
Category: Dishonored (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Minor Violence, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-12
Updated: 2012-11-19
Packaged: 2017-11-18 14:45:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 29,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/562209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Smaragdina/pseuds/Smaragdina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Stupid girl. Of course we lied. Everybody lies. You’d better get used to it. If you want to be any use in this world, you’d better start learning how.” AU. Corvo dies on the headsman's block, and Emily must grow up and learn that the only person who can rescue her is herself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Additional warnings: very brief references to child prostitution

_Citizens of Dunwall rejoice: the assassin Corvo Attano, murderer of our beloved Empress, is dead. Justice has been served. Attention, citizens of Dunwall. The assassin Corvo Attano is dead._

*****

The bells ring all day.

They thunder and clang in the air above Holger Square, brash and incessant, relentless as the beating of the sea. They do not stop. They are so loud. They go on and on and on, joy pounded out in cheap brass, until Emily’s head aches and until each clang brings an answering throb of pain to her skull.

The bells rang like this when Mother died – but this time they are _happy_.

And they _do not stop_.

She curls up in the corner of her room at the Golden Cat, hands over her ears, as the headache in her skull builds and builds to the rhythm of propaganda pounding in the air. And when the Pendleton twins bang on her door at suppertime, that is all that it takes for her to burst into tears.

“You _lied_ to me!” she shrieks, ducking back when Morgan goes to grab her arm. “You said he was already dead! You said – _you said_ –”

“Told you,” sneers Custis. His hands are in his back pockets and his tone is _bored_. “She’s been hoping he’d come for her this whole time.”

( _Corvo Attano is dead,_ drones the announcer in the air outside. _Rejoice. Be at ease. Corvo Attano is dead_.)

Morgan laughs at his brother’s words and goes to grab her again. His hands are not cruel, but neither are they gentle; and Emily shoves him away, burn in her throat and tears hot on her cheeks. “You _lied_ to me,” she repeats, jaw set and shaking.

“ _Stupid_ girl,” the man snaps. He yanks her forward by the arm and roughly wipes the tears from her cheeks with the white hem of his sleeve. “Of course we lied. Everybody lies. You’d better get used to it. If you want to be any use in this world, you’d better start learning how.”

*****

_Attention, citizens of Dunwall: The Abbey of the Everyman will be closed this afternoon, due to the funerals of Officer of the Watch Geoff Curnow and the five Overseers killed in action while attempting to subdue former Overseer Teague Martin. Services will resume tomorrow. Be advised that Martin, though wounded, has escaped Abbey custody and is still at large._

*****

She hears a splash in the middle of the night and scrambles to her narrow window to see a body floating downriver, naked and pale, bruises blackening the girl’s face.

It is the second one this month.

( _You **told** someone?_ Madame Prudence  had screamed, so loud it had echoed through every floor of the Cat. The crack of flesh on flesh was loud as a gunshot. _No, that’s no excuse! No one can know the girl’s here! You useless little whore, I picked you up out of the gutter and this is how you –_

_I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry –_

_Who did you tell?_

_I d-don’t know, he had a tattoo –_

**_Who did you tell?!)_ **

She had been kind, Emily remembers. Her hair had been red, and not dyed. She’d read to Emily one morning, a story about monsters from Pandyssia and a wicked witch who lived on Clavering. She had a daughter close to her own age.

She is floating down the Wrenhaven with a face gone black from being strangled.

Emily closes the window and creeps back to bed, curling up into a ball. She does not cry, even though it is night and there would be no none to see: it would still leave her with red eyes in the morning, obvious, _weakness_ , and in any case she is _sick_ of crying. She tells herself that she has used all her tears for Mother, and Corvo, and her dolls, and her room in the Tower, and everything else.

(She used to wonder, alone up there, what it would be like to be the princess trapped in the tower in truth. She never thought it would be this boring. She never thought it would be this awful)

There are rats moving through the rooms below. Some of them  have two legs and some have four. It is late at night and the building creaks with the creak of bedsprings, constant, and the halls echo with laughter gone sharp and brittle around the edges. False.

The people here strip each other naked in narrow rooms and learn each other’s secrets, but she’s learning that it means that they have only more to hide.

*****

_Be aware that demonstrations against our Lord Regent will be taken as acts of treason, and that the Watch can and will respond with lethal force. We request that you all be patient and understanding in these troubling times._

*****

There are rats in the building, and rats in the walls, and rats that run across her floor at night. Emily watches them from the safety of her bed, legs drawn up and away from the floor. Prudence likes to think she keeps a clean establishment; but there is nothing about Prudence that can ever be called _clean_ , and the rats come every night.

Emily studies the way they move, the way they scrabble across the floor, the way they scurry and scuttle and make no more noise than a whisper.

She imitates them.

The first time she tries to escape she makes it halfway down the stairs before she is caught by a patron with the reek of whiskey on his breath. “And who are you?” he booms, lifting her up as if she is nothing. “Someone’s daughter? Someone’s niece? Unless Prudence is offering even stranger things these days –”

And Prudence appears, sudden as lightning, face twisted into a snarl where the man cannot see. She talks a pretty lie and leads him off, and once he’s gone she whirls on Emily with hand raised as if she means to strike her.

But she can’t. She _can’t_. Emily sets her feet and lifts her chin and tastes the lie in her mouth. “I only wanted to see –“ she begins –

“I don’t care who you are, _girl_ , you’re in for a world of pain if you do that again. Understand?”

(She understands, alright – she understands the importance of being silent and small as a rat and not being caught).

The second time she makes it all the way to the door and pulls hard on the handle, back and forth. She works a hairpin between frame and lock and worries at it like Corvo had once mentioned to her, but the pin snaps and does nothing. Nothing at all. The door is locked. And then there are footsteps in the hall behind  her, and she has to run off and slips back upstairs with her heart and bitter tears both in the back of her throat.

That is how it goes.

Emily sits on her bed with her feet drawn up and watches a white rat scurry back and forth on her floor, watching it watching her, watching moonlight glint off tiny red eyes and thinking of Prudence’s ugly red hair and red blood and doors that are forever locked.

She knows that she should kill the rat: that one bite can make her rave and weep and fall down dead. But its fur is white as her favorite clothes, and it is sleek and tiny and alone. And she has watched two young women float facedown in the river for her. If she is going to kill, Emily thinks, she is going to kill those who deserve it.

She curls her arms tight around her skinny knees and curls her fingers into fists.

In the morning the light is bright in her narrow slot of a room. It catches shining on a ripped-up section of siding in the corner. Emily bends down, dirtying the knees of her white clothes, thinking of holes where white rats live and wishing she could follow them out. The hole behind the siding is just large enough for a rat, indeed, and she bites her lip and worms her small hand in to feel her fingers close on something thin and cold. She draws it forth.

It is Prudence’s master key.

And when the morning sunlight hits it just right, it _shines_.

*****

_Anyone with information on the missing Emily Kaldwin, heir to the Empire, is urged to come forth. The Lord Regent is prepared to offer a reward to any man who can point him to her whereabouts. Demonstrations against the Lord Regent are still considered deliberate acts of treason._

*****

She never gets to use it.

It’s late in the afternoon, a few hours before opening, and the Pendleton twins are already drunk. Overseer Campbell is there and the three of them are fighting. It is something that happens more and more, these days; and where Emily had once pressed her hands over her ears to block it out like the sound of bells, she now presses her ear to the floorboards and _listens._

“The Abbey teaches that drinking leads to corruption,” drawls Campbell, dry.

Custis laughs in answer. “Piss on –”

“Perhaps we have a _point_ ,” Campbell snaps. His voice is cool where those of the twins are honeyed and slurred. “Your brother –”

“Is a miserable worm.”

“No more bite than a puppy.”

“A kicked puppy.”

“There’s a reason you don’t see him around here.”

“Doesn’t have the balls.”

“Doesn’t have _any_ balls.”

“Probably a bastard.”

“Should have been drowned at birth.”

“We tried.”

“Would that you had succeeded,” says Campbell, and there is a crack and an _oof_ and a curse and a yell. “You told him -!”

“We never!”

“Oh, just because you don’t have any _memory_ of the conversation doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, you _idiots_ , he sent Burrows an inquiry, the little worm _knows she’s here_ and if you’d just stopped drinking and pulled your heads out of your respective asses long enough –”

And Emily never gets to hear the rest. There is an almighty crack and crash and _thunder_ that shakes dust from the ceiling and shakes the building on its foundation. She is thrown from her bed and onto the floor, reeling, bruises blossoming on her hands and knees where they strike the floorboards. She can hear shouting from down below and the smell of smoke, black acrid, and the rats are streaming from the hole in the torn-up siding like a river and flowing out the door and down the stairs –

She follows them, running, precious key clutched tight in her hand.

There is another crack and crash and she almost loses her footing again.

“Naval bombardment,”she can hear Custis cursing, imagine the spittle flying from his mouth _._ “Look out the window – who owns that ship? Who the hell _owns_ that _ship?_ How _dare -!”_

**_BOOM_.**

And the third shell rips into the seaward side of the building with a shriek of splintering wood.

Custis goes suddenly silent. Cut off. Emily runs, key biting into her palm –

She runs straight into the arms of a man who catches her tight and claps a huge hand over her mouth.

“Don’t scream,” he hisses into her ear. Dragging her away, her feet fighting for purchase on the floorboards. “I’m a friend. Name’s Martin. We’ll get you out of here, Emily, I promise, I promise –”

She can see out of the corner of her eye that he’s got a black patch over his eye like a pirate, that half his face is scored by a sword-slash from ear to eye, can feel that he limps and lists hard to the left – “that’s our ship in the harbor,” he’s saying, and his words are tight and so is his smile but the flash of his teeth looks almost _delighted_ , “not the way we planned, but Havelock pulled it off.” And her heart soars and she thinks of pirates and princesses and daring rescues and adventures far at sea –

And then there is a thunder and a burst of smoke that has nothing to do with the ship at all.

And there is a spray of blood in her face, hot.

It’s not like the gush of blood from a hole straight through Mother’s chest. That had been brilliant red, dark and thick. This is as fine and as light as mist.

The hands holding her are suddenly limp and suddenly gone, and Martin tumbles to the floor, and Emily looks and wishes she hadn’t.

He doesn’t –

He doesn’t have much of a _head_ anymore.

Her stomach turns over. She bends double and is violently sick all over the blood-slick floor. The smoke burns the back of her throat when she inhales and she can do nothing but hang there limp when Campbell walks up and grabs her by the collar to lead her away. His hand is surprisingly gentle, but the pistol is still clutched tight in his fist.

“Need to tell Burrows that his time’s up,” he mutters, barely audible over Emily’s shudder-sob breathing and the sound of the Cat burning around them. He turns his head and spits. “So much for that.”

*****

_The immediate area surrounding Dunwall Tower will be closed today in preparation for the coronation. Be reminded that tomorrow is a holiday. The interregnum is over. Long live Empress Emily Kaldwin the First. Long live the Empire._

*****

They all look at her with eyes made of glass.

They reveal nothing. Their faces are blank. Their eyes are mirrors, reflecting only her own stumbles and stutters and mistakes back to her, and it slowly dawns on Emily that they are not watching her at all. That she is something to be dressed in pretty clothes and trotted out and dandled before the throne.

A show.

A sham.

A lie.

( _If you try to tell them that Corvo didn’t kill your mother_ , Burrows had told her, face calm and serious and fingers steepled together over the ocean of his desk, _there will be nothing on this earth that will save you. We will stop giving you Elixir, and you know what will happen then._ He’d smiled, then, an expression that tried to be _kind_ and that ended up looking like it was carved from ceramic. _It’s nothing personal, Emily, it’s only that Corvo’s the story they know. And it makes a **better** story. Do you understand?_

 _Yes_ , she’d said.

As if Elixir were not bitter enough already. As if everything were not bitter enough already.)

Emily stands before the court and signs a pretty sheet of paper with a pretty little lie that tells the official story, the names _Jessamine Kaldwin_ and _Corvo Attano_ and _Hiram Burrows_ couched in fancy terms and long legal words she does not know. Her signature is scrawled, unsteady, a child’s hand, but the court applauds like thunder.

They would applaud even louder, she thinks, if she were a trained seal.

The door to the throne room shuts tight behind her to block out the noise, but she can still hear it beating in her head like the bells that ring in celebration as Burrows leads her up the stairs to the very top of the tower.

“Your old room,” he says. “Isn’t it nice to be back?”

And Emily gives him a pretty little lie, too.

He shuts the door and leaves her there, alone at last for the first real time since they’d dragged her straight from brothel to tower and scrubbed the mist of blood from her face and bleached her clothes and put on their little coronation show. Emily stands there in her old room. Turns in a slow circle. It is exactly as she left it nearly a year ago; it is as if she had never left at all. Even all of her dolls are there, each and every one.

They are soft and plush and forgiving.

Their stitched smiles are stiff and happy.

Their button eyes are round, and empty, and oh so shining.

Emily picks up the doll that had been her favorite and hugs it for a moment. Its eyes are black and blank as the Void. And no matter how hard she holds it, its smile does not move. It is as if no time has passed. As if nothing has changed.

She stands there for a long time.

And then she goes to the window and opens the latch and throws each and every doll into the sea. And then, and only then, does she curl in a ball in the corner of the bed with her arms around her skinny knees and finally, _finally_ allow herself to truly cry.

*****

_Due to continuing dire shortages, rations of Sokolov’s Elixir will be restricted to one half-dose per family unit each week. Failure to pick up your assigned ration is grounds for investigation._

*****

“There are rats in the tower,” she tells Sokolov over dinner. “I saw a white one run across the throne room.”

“There are rats _everywhere_ ,” the man grouses, staring sullen-eyed into the empty circle of his glass.

He does that a lot these days.

She supposes that he’s enjoying the state of the city just as much as she is.

It has been well over a year, and Emily can count the days that she’s stepped outside the high white walls of Dunwall Tower on one hand. “Can’t I go out more?” she asks the Regent, slipping into the door of his office without knocking _just_ because she knows it will annoy him. “Mother always liked to let the people –”

“It’s not safe,” he snaps. “We can’t have you catching the plague.”

“You give me Elixir every day.”

Burrows sniffs, turns away to fuss at the map of the city on the wall. Whole sections are dark or blocked out in red, the domain of Weepers. “There might be another assassination attempt,” he replies. He sounds bored.

Emily grins at his back, knowing that he’ll hear it in her voice even if he cannot see. The edges of the grin are _sharp_. She scuffs a toe against the floor and puts an innocent note in her voice, a note that she hasn’t used in _honestly_ for a year. “I thought the assassin was dead,” she says. “I thought you chopped his head off.”

And Burrows laughs and laughs.

But that is all she gets from her request, no matter how man times she repeats it: the sound of the Regent’s laughter, bitter as her smile. The walls remain high and impassable. The gates remain shut. The months roll on, and the plague grows and gnaws at the borders of the city. And while they tell her of _this neighborhood_ and _that district_ fallen to sickness and death, they are only concepts to her. Abstract. Sections of a map of a city she’s never really seen.

When she tries to wheedle and sneak her way out the front gate, her breakfast arrives the following morning with its dose of Elixir conspicuously absent. The point is made. There are no more attempts. She understands.

She is a false Empress over a domain that she can never touch.

She wonders if Mother ever felt this way. She wonders if ruling is always like this.

She wonders whose fault it is, precisely – the fault of a man who ran a sword through her mother so that it came out red as weeping, the fault of the man who swung another sword and cut off her father’s head to the beat of bells. Or the fault of the man who grew rich off corpses and did nothing as it happened, merely stood by so still and vulture-thin and silent, as he now stands behind her throne.

She wonders what would happen if all these men were dead.

*****

_This is a warning and a reminder that the gang calling themselves the Whalers are not to be approached at any costs. Citizens living in districts under their control can petition the Watch for relocation. The following districts are now considered hostile territory…_

*****

Burrows is, she admits, at least partially right: the white walls of Dunwall Tower mark the borders of the safest place in the city. The nobility, in a quiet and desperate sort of way, is fighting to get in. She is not sure which lure is the strongest: the ability to influence her, or the opportunity to bow and scrape for the Lord Regent’s favor, or the chance to wheedle and beg a dose of Elixir straight from Sokolov’s hands before it has gone through taxes or the hands of those who might contaminate it with water or worse.

The Tower becomes a sanctuary for those who are best at begging and wheedling and lying.

It is no coincidence, then, that these men become her tutors.

Campbell brings in a junior Overseer to instruct her in religion and morality. The man has no patience and little sense, Emily finds, because when she asks “what does the Abbey say about liars?” he waffles and _hmms_ and cannot even give her the courtesy of a proper and hypocritical answer. She resolves, overnight, to nod and smile and never listen to a word he says.

Sokolov instructs her, when he can be bothered, on the far-flung theories of Natural Philosophy. Astonomy and astrology and the bones of the body and the workings of the soul. For her ninth birthday he gifts her a tiny easel and a few pots of paint and a set of paintbrushes all in miniature. He stands over her shoulder and _harrumphs_ as she paints a picture of her view out the tower.

“Promising,” he tells her, and the smile he gives her is the gift in truth.

Emily prefers drawing, but decides not to tell him.

The second picture she paints is one of her mother, which (flaws and errors and shaky lines aside) is a much more accurate representation of her, Emily thinks, than the stuffy old formal portrait that hangs on the walls of the solar. That portrait is so _grey_. Dead. It doesn’t look much like Mother all. It never has. It never will.

The third picture she paints is of Corvo – and before it’s half-finished she returns to her rooms one evening to find that it is gone, torn from the easel, no sign that it had existed at all.

She is furious. And she is hardly surprised.

(And when she confronts the Lord Regent about it, he pretends not to know what she’s talking about; and Emily gets sent to bed without supper for throwing a crystal glass at his head)

Sokolov can only be bothered to teach her of philosophy and painting, formally, once a week or so. But Emily sees far more of him than that. The man lives in the tower, now, what with the Whalers and Weepers encroaching on Kaldwin’s Bridge, and he takes his quiet imprisonment about as well as she – which is to say not well at all. He grumbles and complains and curses when Emily slips inside his lab and sits at his knee and pesters him with questions, but no matter what she asks he does not throw her out. It is more than she can say of anyone else in the tower.

(He does not even throw her out in the nights when she comes in late, dragging blankets, and makes herself a nest on the couch in the corner because the lights of scientific madness are warmer and brighter than the shadows in her too-large room)

“Tell me about the plague,” she begs, bouncing back and forth on her toes. “How long does it take to kill someone? How bad is it? Is anyone immune? How do you make the Elixir? Do I really need to take it every day? What happens if I –”

“Outsider’s fishy _eyes_ , girl,” Sokolov groans, running chemical-stained hands through his wild hair.

And he tells her. Each and every thing. He likes having someone to talk to, Emily figures. He likes having someone who will listen.

The Pendletons, on the other hand, do not care if she listens at all. They simply talk. It is a necessary competition between them: all the old relationships have broken down, and the two of them need to figure out where they stand.

Treavor takes her aside one day, after a long lesson where he and Morgan had talked over each other about the workings of Parliament and societal niceties and the way to shake a hand and how to lie without lying. He pulls her into an alcove in the hall and half-bends to look her in the eye. _Half_ -bends, only; she’s tall, these days, and only growing. “Listen, Emily,” he says, and his voice is quiet and half a sigh. “I’m not sure how much you know about what all happened that day they took you from the Golden Cat –”

“I know.” Does he think she’s stupid? She usually likes it when people underestimate her, but sometimes it is _maddening_. “That was the day your brother died. There was a conspiracy to get me out.”

Treavor blinks. “Yes, exactly –”

“So? Do you want me to like you better because you were part of it?” She scuffs a toe against the floor. “The old Admiral got executed. Why did Burrows let you live?”

Treavor blinks again. Eyes like a fish. And Morgan yells at him from the other room, and that is the end of that.

(He lives, Emily knows, because of the makeup of Parliament. Because Morgan needed someone to shadow him to fill the shadow of his twin. He lives because Burrows is in need of men who think nothing of conspiracy. Because he is in need of rats that actually follow his plans)

The rats in the Golden Cat had taught her how to sneak and scuttle; the rats in the shape of the two surviving Pendleton brothers are the ones who teach her how to be a rat in _truth_ , how to worm her way through the tunnels and alleys of aristocracy. How to lie.

The Boyle sisters teach her how to do it with a smile. They are all beautiful, and nigh indistinguishable, copies of one another with hair the color of money and carefully cultivated curves. It takes Emily a while to tell them apart, and she wonders if this is by design. Most men, she thinks, will barely scratch their triple-mirrored surface.

Esma is at the tower most often, hanging in Sokolov’s shadow when she does not trail after Burrows himself, and every once in a while she takes Emily aside for tea and lessons on how to dress and how to politely stab in the back.

Lydia comes to teach her music. Emily learns quickly that she has no talent, and that Lydia finds the lessons frustrating as she. But there is something lovely in music. The keys play only what she asks them to play. The notes are always exactly the same. The instrument is one of the few things left in the tower, she thinks, that is entirely honest.

The youngest of the Ladies Boyle is Waverly, and at first she teaches Emily nothing at all. She comes by a few times every month and sneers at the paintings, stands in the middle of empty unlit rooms and sighs into the dark. She is lonely, Emily learns. Dark in the shadow of her older sisters. Half-forgotten. Emily invites her to tea in the small room in the back of the tower, and learns very quickly that Waverly’s smile is sharp and does little to light up her face.

There is a portrait of the Lord Regent hanging over the table, and Emily nods at it as she pours the tea in china cups. “So which one of you is he sleeping with?”

Waverly blinks at her and laughs. Sound like broken glass. “They were right about you,” she chuckles. Eyes Emily over the rim of her little cup. “Does it matter?”

“No.”

“You’re smarter than you look.” Her eyes turn sidelong. Emily sees the look, sips her tea to buy herself a second to think. She is (literally and not) smaller than this woman in many ways, but this is an advantage. She has no doubt that the youngest Boyle sister notices how she has been deliberately tipped off balance; she, like Emily, is a child in the shadow of others, lonely and forgotten, and she is no doubt aware of such things. Of the games they have to play.

There is a rumor in the tower that Waverly is _dark_ in many ways despite her golden Boyle hair, and that she has a suitor that is dark as well, and that she dances on the edge of a knife. That the knife and the suitor are both named _treason_. Rumors, she knows, are often true. It is time to test.

Emily makes her voice innocent. “Esma teaches me manners and fashion,” she says. “Lydia teaches me music. What are you here to teach me?”

Waverly hesitates and glances at the shadows around them. Touches a hand to her throat. Touches her own hand and twists a ring off her finger, handing it out to Emily with the stone in its pale setting facing up. The setting pops open with a _click_ and reveals a hollow space the size of a pearl. “Nothing,” says Waverly, as she presses the ring into Emily’s hand and shows her how to click the hidden compartment closed. “Nothing at all.”

*****

_This is an announcement that any and all paintings by Anton Sokolov are hereby declared property of the Crown. Owners of such paintings are required to surrender them at once._

*****

It is all beginning to fall apart.

The plague gnaws away at the heart of the city like the rats gnaw meat away from bone. The neighborhoods crumble. The blockade around the harbor stands. Trade withers. The ships bearing the bodies of whales do not cease to come in, not quite, but they slow, and whale oil becomes precious.

It is hard for Sokolov to get his ingredients with traffic and trade stoppered so, and his Elixir becomes more precious than gold.

It is more precious than life itself, because it is life itself.

Burrows rails and rages alone in his office (Emily can hear him late at night, can hear things shattering against the wall and then hear him call for maids to clean it up and restore his precious _order_ ). But no matter what he does, no matter how many taxes he hikes or laws he passes, it does nothing. He can escape the plague in his white tower-walls, can hide behind the throne, can hide his debt behind the skirts of the Ladies Boyle, but he cannot escape the fact that the Crown is losing money.

And he will let her do nothing, of course. Nothing at all. The doors to Parliament shut in her face. The conversations quiet when she walks past. The men in the tower teach her many, many things, history and philosophy, etiquette and arithmetic and painting – but never anything _useful_. Never the cogs and underpinnings of the city, the lines of trade, the dances of foreign policy. Never governance. Not in any way that prepares her for a life of more than staring out a window.

Emily amuses herself by lingering outside the audience chamber one busy afternoon and singing, loudly. It’s not thirty seconds before Esma Boyle appears and drags her away by the _ear_. Apparently Tyvian diplomats do not appreciate the singing of a lonely child, even if that child is Empress. Apparently young girls should not be singing about stuffing corpses into sacks and throwing them to the plague rats. _Apparently_.

Apparently, it is all beginning to fall apart. And Emily can do nothing. She has no power. She can neither help nor hinder the city’s slow collapse at all. This, the Regent has assured.

And so.

The paintings are Emily’s idea (after she notices Esma _ooing_ and _awing_ over Sokolov’s latest; after she sees the woman reach into her purse and give him more money for it than she’d ever dream to pay in tax alone; after a Parliament brat mentions that the only things that foreigners are willing to buy are things that cannot carry the plague). She catches Burrows and Sokolov both over breakfast one morning, as the latter pours a little vial of the day’s blood-red elixir into the glass of the former. She crosses her arms and gives them her plan in simple, flat words.

Burrows sniffs.

Sokolov grumbles and looks utterly outraged – but Emily keeps talking, and eventually the outrage turns to a smile. And she knows that she has won.

The income from gathering the paintings scattered over the city and selling them to foreign buyers is nothing. Everyone knows this. It will only keep the Crown afloat another week. But it buys Emily, at least, a small measure of respect. She hoards it as dearly as the Elixir they give her every morning.

The paintings come in slowly. So slowly. There is a day, then, when the Crown seizes control of the house of an art dealer who died in some sort of electrical accident at the re-built shack of the Golden Cat on Clavering, and there are eight or ten of them at once. Emily trails after Sokolov’s shadow as he comes down to look at them, peeling the shrouding white sheets away and clucking his tongue.

(The Pendletons appear halfway through and stand on either side of Sokolov, hurling carefully-timed volleys of carefully-timed coordinated jabs, until he surrenders the painting of them and their deceased brother without accepting a single cent. She sees them share a look as they haul it away. It contains more emotion than she thought the pair was capable of combined)

Emily has lived her entire life with the aristocracy, of course, and she recognizes every single subject of the paintings. Or close enough. Sokolov is happy to point out the ones she does not, and Emily gets to listen to him spend five minute waxing poetic on the beauty of a woman named Vera Moray, fresh from mysteries in the heart of darkest Pandyssia and with the power and charm to wrap the nobility of Dunwall around her slender pinky finger. The man is more animated than she has ever seen him, waving his hands as he talks (beard wagging, eyebrows about to take flight from his face), expounding upon the history and circumstance of each and every canvas that his hands have touched. He is happy to explain them all to her. Each and every one.

All but one.

“Who’s that?” she asks, peering out from under Sokolov’s arm and pointing. The man in the painting is tall, viewed from below. He looms. His coat is the color of blue ash and his hand is stiff and clawlike, overlarge, and scars score his face until it is ragged as the bark of a twisted tree. He seems to look at her. Emily feels the hair stand up on the back of her neck, smells blood on the air, and she cannot remember why. “That man? Who is he?”

“No one,” Burrows snaps across the room before the Royal Physician can answer. “Someone who’s dead now.”

“He had to have been someone, or Anton wouldn’t have painted him.”

“He’s a crime boss. Unimportant. Paid a lot of money for this, that’s all. He’s no one.”

Emily squints to read the title before the painting is covered and whisked away. _Daud_ , it says. _Daud and the Parabola of Lost Seasons._

She vaguely recognizes the name from a wanted poster of years ago, but cannot place it more than that. And _parabola_ is a word that has come up in Sokolov’s lessons. Just once or twice. She does not know what it means, exactly; just that it has to do with curves, and arcs, and things that circle back.

*****

_Attention: due to whale oil shortages, the City Watch will be cutting back security. While the same checkpoints are still in place and will be rigidly enforced, the Walls of Light and Watchtowers at the following locations will be decommissioned…_

*****

The tower is not like the Golden Cat. It grows deathly quiet at night. She can hear more than voices from below and the rats scuttling in the walls. She can hear the world outside.

As the months go on, the electrical hum of Sokolov’s inventions fades from the air. The lights of the city outside become lesser. Blue gives way to candlelight once more, then fires to red flame and smoke. The shuddering steps of Tallboys in the night become replaced by the sound of shouting. And weeping. Always, always weeping.

The riots are getting ever closer to the white walls of their sanctuary. Emily watches, now, as the funerals of the wealthy begin to crop up like patches of weeds in a walled-in garden (Shaw, White, a nervous man named Brisby whose death saw all three Ladies Boyle appear at the tower next morning in a riot of color and brittle-sharp laughter, making demands). She is not sure which of the deaths are due to fever and madness and eyes running red, and which are due to fire and mobs that broke their bodies on the street. She only knows that it does not matter.

The borders that Burrows has set up to keep the chaos contained are breaking down.

He fears the plague, Emily knows (as she sits up in the dark twisting Waverly Boyle’s ring around and around on her finger). He fears it more than insurrection or rebellion. More than hunger or fire or debt. It is the monster he has made.

He does not say as much, of course. He was the Spymaster and is far too clever to confess. But if every man in the tower teaches her things, Burrows is the one who teaches her how to _see_. He leads by example. He was the Spymaster, and Emily learns from him, and she can read the guilt and fear of rats in the flicker of his eyes.

She knows.

“How do you make the Elixir?” she asks Sokolov one night when the sound of riots is loud outside. “How does it work?”

The man pauses in picking his teeth, looking at her out of the corner of his eye.

“Why would a girl like you want to know that? Want to become a chemist, eh?”

 _Burrows told me not to say,_ is what he really says. _You are to stay dependent on us. Burrows does not want you to fend for yourself._

(It is the same answer she’s gotten from every man and woman from the tower when she’s asked about the scar-faced man in the painting. Closed doors. Nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing.)

In the end, Sokolov does not tell her. Not the recipe. Not enough.

But it is _enough_.

Each day, when she visits Sokolov to pester him with questions, Emily is careful to take an extra half-vial of Elixir and stow it inside her pocket. She prizes up a floorboard in her room and keeps them there: a stockpile against the day when Burrows decides that he does not need her Kaldwin name and grows tired of keeping such a little girl _dependent_ on him.

Each day, in Sokolovs lab, she steals a small pinch of white powder from one of the many vials on his workbench. She is careful, ever careful. It is not poison. It is not the blood of rats. It will not contaminate the Elixir. It is something as untraceable as water, and with the same effect.

It will nullify it.

Emily proposes to Burrows that she do as her mother once did: that she join him for breakfast each day on a particular porch on the seaward side of the tower, where the air is pleasant, where they can sip their tea and talk of things personal and political. She is old enough, she says. She is Empress in name if not in truth. It will be good, she says, for her to know at least a few small workings of the realm she is supposed to rule.

And she is getting older. And Burrows has some sense. And he relents.

And so each day, when they drink their morning Elixir from tiny glasses and sit on a porch where there are no witnesses around to see, Emily is careful to slip the contents of her ring into the red of the Lord Regent’s dose and watch him drink it down.

*****

_Citizens are urged not to fall for counterfeit Elixirs. The only sure defense against the plague comes from the hands of the Royal Physician. Piero’s Spiritual Remedy is a not a substitute._

*****

Days pass, and turn to weeks, and lengthen into months. Burrows grows pale, though whether from nerves or illness Emily cannot tell. She watches him carefully. He does not slump or sniff or cough. His skin does not turn grey and crater with pocks. His eyes most certainly do not run red.

But where he was once merely paranoid, she now fears that he is halfway mad.

There comes a night when the tower is loud. The mob has surged up against the white walls like water licking at a failing levee, and the smell of smoke is high in the air. The nighttime rages with shouts, screams, sporadic bursts of the Watch’s gunfire. The guards in the halls speak in hushed voices about evacuation plans, explosives to clear the gate of civilians or boats with doused lights slipping down the lock and out to sea in silence.

(“Don’t you idiots understand symbolism?” she hears Sokolov complain to the guards as he passes by her stair. “There can be no evacuation. If the Empress abandons the tower she abandons Dunwall. If Duwnall is lost the Empire is lost. _Pah._ The Lord Regent, though, he can do as he likes.”)

Emily slips from her room like a rat and winds her way down to the floor above the Lord Regent’s study. She presses her ear to a vent to hear him raging in the room below.

He is _not_ , however, raging about the screams of rage that hang like bloody flags in the air.

“Why won’t he be _dead?_ ” he spits, and there is the sound of a cabinet full of glass breaking. “I paid him, three times what his fee was I paid him, I set up quarantines to give his little gang dominion over far too much of the city. And now he wants _more?_ ” Sound of paper ripping, map of Dunwall fluttering to the floor. “I should have had him killed as soon as the job was done. Years ago. Yes. Maybe had Corvo do it. Send a murderer to kill a murderer. If he’d be dead there’d be no loose ends. I _can’t_ have loose ends. I’ve come too far. _Too. Far_.”

Another burst of gunfire outside, spit and spark. Another _crack_ of a man’s head getting blown to bloody mist. An answering crash from below. A _bang_ as Burrows throws open the window. “Make them _shut up!”_

Emily keeps a hand pressed tight over her mouth to keep from making any noise. She has no idea who or what he speaks of. But the breaks and catches and creaking hinges in his voice form the cadence of a man who is mad, or getting close.

She cannot work with madness. It cannot be planned or bought or manipulated. It is not something that can be played like the predictable strings of a harpsichord, and this worries her.

And so.

The following morning the sun is bright, and the smoke is nearly gone from the air, and they meet for breakfast as usual and sit across from each other on a white-draped table. Burrows is pale and Emily is pale; though the reasons, she expects, are different. One is exhaustion. One is nerves.

She thinks of the way her mother looks in the painting, face set and steel in her spine. And she swallows hard to calm herself.

Emily reaches across the table for an apricot tart. And when her hand is positioned just _so_ over the Lord Regent’s tiny dose of red Elixir she stops, pauses, _deliberate_ , clicks the ring open and holds it there, just shy of tipping the powder down. She watches the way the last of the color drains from Burrows’s face and she catches his eye with her own.

“Don’t call the guards,” says Emily. Her voice is simple, but all the innocence is gone from it. She is twelve, and it is the first time she has spoken to Burrows as a young woman and not as a girl all dressed in white. “It’s not poison.”

The man’s throat moves in his skinny neck. Up and down.  The fear is naked on his face and reedy in his voice. “How long?”

“Months. It’s only luck you haven’t gotten sick.”

(Luck; and the fact that when she’d gone to the Abbey to speak before the rioting crowd the month before, Burrows had stayed behind for fear that the mob would tip and tear apart his armored car).

And Emily lets him know, with the set of her spine and the glint in her eye, that she is a girl who _would_ allow him to get sick. That she would watch and do nothing as blood began to run from his eyes like the tears she does not allow himself to shed. She watches Burrows gather himself. It is a struggle. Watches him draw a thin breath and fold his hands before him on the table in the attitude of one negotiating.

“What do you want?”

She pauses as if she needs to consider. As if she has not rehearsed this moment in front of the mirror many times.

“Three things. I want you to stop _hiding_ start trying to cure the plague.” She thinks, with a pang, of the Elixir she has stored in her room gone to waste, of the way that she will no longer be able to easily tell how closely they are keeping her leashed. But she also thinks of the sound of fire and riots in the night. Curing the plague will cure the city. Open up trade again. Fill the coffers and quiet the streets. Cement (she tries not to wince) the Regent’s shaky hold on the crown. Whatever social change or great cleansing he’d hoped to implement by letting it fester is finished. She tells him as much, and sees him nod.

“And?”

“I want you to tell me who that man in the painting was. I want to know why you’re afraid of him.”

The Regent’s lips grow tight and white, but he does not object. At least not with words. Not something nearly so set and stone. “And the third?”

“I want to be sure that what happened to my mother can never happen to me.”

There are many ways that Hiram Burrows can interpret that request, and Emily’s heart beats high in her throat and she watches the man consider. She wonders which one he will settle on.

*****

_Any and all scientists, researchers and natural philosophers are ordered to report to Dunwall Tower at once to join the Royal Physician in finding a cure for the plague. This is a matter of utmost importance._

*****

Emily is tall for her almost-thirteen years, but Dr. Galvani towers over her. He is a huge man in every way, and when he picks her up and roars a greeting she feels like a doll. Crushable. “Finally!” he booms in her face, voice flavored with a Serkonin accent that has clearly been kept _deliberately_ through the years, “thank you, little Empress, for allowing me this chance! Working together, we will have the plague cured in no time, you will see!”

“Put her down, Galvani,” Treavor Pendleton snaps from around the corner. “She’s your _Empress_. And I’m aware it’s a challenge but _do_ keep quiet, we can hear you in half the tower.” He sighs. His fingers play around the long neck of a small glass bottle in his hand. “I wish that Piero fellow were still alive. He’d probably be able to help even more. Actually had his own version of Elixir which, if I remember correctly, tasted better.”

Sokolov pauses in frowning at the rat specimens that Galvani has brought long enough to frown even more at all three of them. “I would not work with Piero. Not now, not ever.” His great eyebrows draw together. “He is dead?”

“Dead when the Watch raided the Hound Pits all those years ago. Along with the rest of the servants. Poor man.”

“ _Pah_. And his work?”

“Gone.” Treavor gives an eloquent shrug. “Washed into the sewer, probably.”

“ _Pah_. A waste.”

*****

_All uninfected persons are required by law to present themselves at designated locations to be vaccinated against the plague. Failure to comply is an act of treason. Rejoice, citizens of Dunwall, for the reign of terror of the rat has come to an end._

*****

Vaccination is not cure. The streets are still segregated between the immune and the dying. There are still fires in the night, and the newspapers spin horrible stories of healthy loved ones clinging to pock-marked and claw-curled hands as they burn together. Emily is paraded around the city to give speeches, comfort the grieving and the condemned alike, spin a message of hope. She lends her voice to the announcements that hang in the air over Dunwall – and while she speaks, her hands are clenched in white-knuckle fists, and she wonders how many of the plague-cleansing fires are the Regent’s fault.

It takes a long time before the fires quiet, before it is safe to go out in cars that are not armored, before the poor cease beating on their doors and the seas open again and the world begins to right itself.

It takes precisely that long, then, for Burrows to complete his third promise.

Emily prides herself on seeing all the inner workings of the tower and holding secrets close. Still, it is not what she expects.

*****

_Please report the location of any and all surviving infected loved ones to the City Watch. Do not believe lies and slander. They will be well taken care of._

*****

At fourteen, Emily is nearly as long of leg as her mother was at thirty. She finds that she can fit into many of Jessamine’s old clothes that have been kept carefully preserved and mothballed in the dark of some closet. They need some alterations, of course. The jackets need to be taken in. She does not have half of the curves that Jessamine displays in the portrait that hangs in the tower.

It is not that she’s underfed, especially not with trade open and the city flowering around them. It is nerves. Stress. It is (Emily decides) that her body is stubbornly trying to cling to a childhood it never had.

Waverly Boyle has curves enough for both of them, though, and greets the almost-Empress with a smile and kisses her on both cheeks. “You look lovely, your majesty,” she coos. “You’re growing up so fast.”

The compliment rings true. This is not what makes Emily smirk. “How can you tell?”

It is, after all, so _dark_ down in the tower’s dungeon.

Waverly chuckles, steps around her to trim a lamp that does little to brighten the gloom of the walls around them. The dark seems _fitting_ , after all; there are things and shapes and stains in this place that Emily is not sure she wishes to see. “Hiram insisted we meet here,” the youngest Boyle complains. “He doesn’t want anyone thinking you’re _unladylike_ , the miserable man.”

“That miserable man is probably listening to us right now.”

“I have more money than he knows what to do with, so I can say what I like. I suppose we should consider it a kindness that he shipped that horrible Executioner off to Coldridge for the day. _Men_. What they consider kindness is often basic human decency.” Waverly arches a pale and perfectly-groomed brow. Catches Emily’s eye in the gloom. “I am still here to teach you _nothing_ , understand.”

“Of course.”

“It is, after all, worth nothing for a woman to defend herself against murderers and madmen.” Waverly reaches into the hem of her jacket and shows Emily the knife that rests in the lining there, how it unfolds, fits the girl’s smaller hands around the whalebone handle and shows her how to hold on. “Survival,” she says, “is not something we are supposed to know.”

She teaches her how to angle the knife, the points on a man’s body where blood is closest to the surface and where a cut may shock and startle, shows where a man might strike or smother or hold her and how to twist her way free as slippery as an eel. She teaches her that these motions must just _come_ , before thought or second guessing, as quick as breath. “Jessamine should have known this,” she says flatly, adjusting her rumpled golden hair while they pause for a moment. “Hiram should have seen that you learn some of it years ago. You’ll not be walking the streets alone, of course, but the nobility can be just as vicious as common thugs.” She steps up, catches Emily by the collar in a mockery of an embrace, nods in approval as the girl fake-kicks up. “Who would you need to use that against?”

Emily thinks of her mother braced backwards over the balcony and the smell of blood on the morning air. “Assassins.”

“No. Aristocrats.”

Emily makes a small and noncommittal sound. Everyone says that parties and balls are little more than genteel bloodbaths; now that she is getting old enough to begin attending them in truth, she can see if this extends beyond mere metaphor. She touches a hand to her throat. Thoughtful. “Can you teach me a Tyvian choke-hold?”

Waverly knows no such thing. But Waverly meets with her once or twice a week, now, in the depths of the dungeon on days when the Executioner has been sent away and where there are no men to see what the Empress is learning. She teaches her how to use her knees and elbows and knife to threaten or flee, how to throw off the grip of a man who sees her only as her body or her name. As a prize or a tool.

And in winter, when the dungeon shadows grow long and chill and sea-storm blue, Waverly brings a lady’s walking cane and shows her how to _hit._

And when Emily begins to speak of such things (of practicing with wooden sticks with Corvo; of the first assassins who dropped them on the floor when killed, if only Jessamine had thought to pick one up), Waverly brings a gentleman’s sword.

Waverly does not know how to use it; or, at least, not well. Emily assures her that it does not matter. She is a small thing and the odds that she will ever lay hands on such a sword are slight. It is only, she says (thinking of the smell of blood and the sound of steel scraping past bone) that she needs to know the _feel_ of it. The weight.

The way it sits in the hand.

The way it sits in the mind.

*****

_Please note that the luxury taxes on alcohol, tobacco, and whale oil will not be repealed until further notice._

*****

“I want,” she tells Burrows, sitting down at breakfast with her fingers laced together and the silver and pearl of Waverly’s ring in full and careful view, “to have a say in governing my Empire.”

Burrows makes a small noise into the bone circle of his teacup (it is fitting, Emily things, that all the deadliest conversations of her life have begun and ended over tea; it is such a _civilized_ setting). “You look lovely this morning, your highness,” he murmurs. “Those were your late mother’s clothes?”

“Yes.”

“I recall she always loved that particular shade of spring green. She though it made her look young.”

“There was a similar suit in the exact shade of blue as a Wall of Light,” Emily replies. The Boyles and Pendletons both have taught her to play this game. “Would that make me look my age? Or would you read that as a threat?”

Burrows sniffs. His eyes  flick down to her ring. “Isn’t that what this is?”

“No,” she lies.

(Then again, it is not a _threat_. It is more like a _demand_. She has listened to the man break the expensive glass of cabinets and display cases in his office while the riots raged outside; it takes a great deal of restraint not to copy him and throw steaming tea in his face).

The Lord Regent tilts his head, first to one side and then the other. It is makes him look even more like an oversized vulture. His tone is _bored._ “You will be given leave to govern on your own when you are sixt-”

“I am _fifteen,_ Hiram.”

“And you are _not ready._ ”

“That’s not my fault,” Emily snaps. “You’ve blocked me at every turn. You give me tutors in every field except governance. You refuse to let me even see this city except for when you trot me out to correct _your_ mistakes. I’m no less of a puppet than I was when I was _eight_. When I’m sixteen, will you cede me any power at all?”

“What would you have me do? Hand the realm over wholesale to –” flick of eyes down to her pale suit, curl of lip “ – a _green_ little girl? Because I have used her name and title to fix my mistakes, yes, while I ruled in her stead? Because I am not perfect? I am _doing my best, Emily.”_

 _No,_ is what he says. He has taught her how to read people from the tilt of their head and the light or lack thereof behind their eyes, so this is what she reads. _No. Never._

Emily finds, when she sips to curb the urge to scream, that all sweetness and savor has gone out of her tea. It is as if sugar has been turned to salt. The taste is almost blood. She thinks of poison, and is unnerved by how badly she wishes to dismiss it out of hand and how she cannot _dare_. “When I turn sixteen,” she says, voice even, “all the official files and records will be open to me. You can legally deny me nothing. Are there things you don’t want me to see?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“We cured the plague two years ago. Is there a reason you still won’t tell me who that man in the painting is? Daud? I had _three_ demands, Hiram, not two.”

“You’re being petty and paranoid.”

“No. You are. Like always. Which one are you more afraid of – him or me?”

The instant she sees the Lord Regent’s knuckles and lips go bone-china white, Emily knows that she has misspoken.

 _Which are you more afraid of?_ she should have asked – _Me? Or the mob that will come and tear the flesh from your bones the moment of my death?_

*****

_Attention: The immediate area surrounding the Golden Cat on Clavering Boulevard is off-limits to civilians while the establishment is under investigation._

*****

It is not like the Cat. It is not like all the years before. There are no fires and murders in the night. The streets are deathly quiet. Emily lies awake in bed as she lay awake in her narrow slot of the room at the Cat those seven, eight years ago. She listens, as she once did, to the rats that scurry through the walls and across the floor.

Some have two legs and some have four.

And she knows all their faces now (except this man named Daud, whose face is _all_ she knows, face and name and half-remembered smell of blood, this man that Burrows will not allow her to see). She knows all their faces and all their motivations. She knows them far, far too well.

Burrows is simple. He desires order. He desires the power to lock and frighten everything into its proper place. And Emily’s childhood now seems to belong to a girl she never was, but it contains hazy memories of dirt-skinned knees and drawings where their should have been lessons, play sparring matches with Corvo, games of hide-and-seek among the pillars that now surround her mother’s grave. Of paintings of Corvo and glasses thrown at the Regent’s head and a twisted whaler’s song sung loud outside the audience chamber door.

Burrows desires _order_ ; and she has always been, Emily knows, a quietly rebellious child.

She sits up in bed and draws her knees to her chest as she had when she was a girl, watches the shadow of a rat grow large and monstrous on the floor as its owner runs back and forth on her windowsill outside.

Burrows has done such a good job protecting her from rats. From plague. He has done that, at least. He has made her the princess in the tower, safe. Precious. Protected.

Her twelfth birthday is several years gone and he has _not_ , Emily realizes with a horrible jolt, ever raised the issue of a Royal Protector.

The sound of her shuddering breath is loud in the still and empty little room.

Because _yes_ , there are justifications. _Yes_ , if she were to bring it up again he would hem and haw that the position was obsolete, that spies served better than swords, offer up Corvo’s name like a shield. And yet – _and yet_ –

She rises from bed all at once, goes to the window and throws it open, letting night wind clatter around the room and fill it with the salted scent of the sea. The rat on the windowsill squeaks in protest and flees. She watches it scrabble up the carved side of the tower, up and over the stone flourish above her and out of sight, fur shining bright in the moonlight. Up and over and gone.

_I want to be sure that what happened to my mother can never happen to me._

He has not yet delivered on one promise. She cannot expect him to keep his word on another.

Emily considers the notched white stone of the window-frame around her and balcony above her, intricately carved and curved and steady. The white fur of a vanishing rat. The white blank face of the moon and the light it casts. She looks down: the guards mill black as ordinary rats below, and their eyes are down as they search and search for men who wish to get in and do her harm.

(Men, Waverly has taught her, are not like women and have not learned to _look_. And one of the places they do not look is _up_ )

She considers.

And she takes a deep breath, kicks off her shoes, steps up and curls her bare toes over the curve of the windowframe and reaches her small hands up to the ledge above.

She does not go far, that first night. The guards move past in steady patrols that keep her frozen and she is afraid, so afraid, of falling. But the next night she does the same. And the next. She marks the way with a rope snuck from the dungeon far below, and there comes a night when she can pull herself up breath by careful breath until she can see all the roof of Dunwall Tower spread out like a sea before her. Shining. And she can see the path of balconies spidering over the face of the tower toward the ground, the path of arches and battlements to the gate; and she can start planning a way forward. And down. And _out_.

*****

_Curfew is still in effect in the following districts…_

*****

She is late to their lesson one afternoon (she’s been late all day, after a night spent climbing towards a gap and a jump toward the gate and freedom), and Waverly looks up annoyed from where she’s perched elegantly on a spindle-backed chair that she’s hauled down to the dark of the dungeon. She looks terribly out of place here, as ever. Impeccably styled, her golden hair bright contrast to the blood on the walls, all female curves in a place of hard lines and the echoes of screams. There are rats around her feet, white and black, and they startle away when Emily approaches. The other woman does not seem to notice. Or care.

“Hiram has been talking about finding suitors for you,” says the youngest Boyle mildly. “And to think, just yesterday you were a skinny little thing who only wanted to know where her dolls were.”

“He will _never_ find suitors for me.” Emily’s voice is sullen. The scuff of her foot on the uneven floor is the gesture of a child, and she knows it, and she _hates_ it. “He’ll –”

“He will _nothing_.”

Emily cannot tell, not with the mix of gloom and perfect paint that shadows and shades the woman’s face, if the crisp note of _nothing_ is denial or deliberate lie. If the flick of the other woman’s eyes toward the ceiling is a warning. It unnerves her. She is usually ever so good at reading people.

She rubs her left ankle with her right foot, the gesture of a child, as she watches Waverly Boyle reach into her pocket and draw forth the ruins of a breakfast tart and scatter the crumbs on the floor. The rats swarm over them. Sleek. White and black and whisking everything away.

“You could…” Emily begins, wonder and worry and the word _plague_ on her tongue.

Waverly smiles. “We’re all immune, aren’t we?” She throws a bit to a rat that is white as the stones of the tower. “They’re not so disgusting up close, no?”

Emily murmurs something in agreement, and they watch the rat as it scurries away, and Waverly takes one look at her face and sits her down and does not speak of self-defense. They speak. Trivial things only. Fashion and gossip and the workings of Parliament and politics far away (more information than Burrows dares give her in a month). The details and trappings of Emily’s sixteenth birthday, barely a week away, the day when she will take up the full mantle of Empress in truth.

(Emily imagines herself shoved against a banquet table and bleeding out red against a spotless tablecloth)

That night, she climbs high. She maps the guard patrols below and goes farther than she ever has, keeping the gate and the city lights in her sights. Her hands are rubbed raw on stone. But the lights in the distance hold a ship, and the ship will take her away, and she can live out her childhood dreams of being no one on the wide dark sea. Not a princess in a tower. Just pirates and magic and everything she dreamed of as a girl. She climbs and climbs and climbs.

And she reaches a gap that is at least twenty meters across, with a fall into a long black chasm of crashing sea. And she can go no farther.

The moon is a low sliver in the sky by the time she returns to her open window and her childhood room. Her first night _back_ in the tower is foremost in her thoughts: all of her stupid dolls tumbling into the sea. They did not break upon the water. They were swallowed down and gently taken whole. But she is _human_ , heart and bone and blood – and if she were to take that jump it would shatter her like glass.

For the first true time since that night in this room years ago, Emily curls in a ball on her bed and _cries_.

*****

_Attention, Officers of the Watch: report all suspicious boat traffic in the vicinity of the Flooded District. Repeat, report all suspicious boat traffic in the Flooded District._

*****

She can hear shouting coming from the Lord Regent’s office.

She can only hope the shouting is not about her.

It’s two voices, only, and the second is not one she recognizes. Male and harsh. The curtains are drawn over the frosted glass door, and so she can see nothing. Emily presses her ear to the hinge, not caring if she is caught by a guard or Burrows or whoever this man is, because it is three days to her sixteenth birthday and the day when she will either be the Empress in truth or _dead_.

(There is the possibility, of course, that she will be neither: that Burrows will block her power as he does today and she will continue on as a shadow of her title. Emily has decided that this will not happen. The fall from the roof of the tower is long. It is not a possibility at all)

She presses her ear tight to the gap between wall and door, and she listens as she has been taught.

“Call off the Watch,” the stranger is saying, and his voice is level where the Regent’s is shrill. “Call off your Overseer dogs. Tell them to stop arresting my men and give me full control over the districts I already hold. I’ll keep the people in check for you.”

“I’ll not be threatened by thugs.”

“You’d know if I was threatening you, Hiram.” Sound of hands on the table, hard. “Call off the Watch.”

“Absolutely not. And don’t pretend this desire to rule half the city is due to a sudden attack of _philanthropy_.”

“Outsider forbid I have a heart.” The man’s voice is _bitter_ , salt-sharp, and Emily winces against the door. “Call off the Watch and leave us in peace and I will use the Whalers to _keep_ the peace. Yes. I _will_. Or keep slaughtering us and I’ll –”

“Get out.”

“After all your _hard work_ , you’d _risk_ me telling –”

_“Out!”_

Emily springs to the side and lounges against the bannister not an instant before the door slams open and the man steps out. She can hear the leather of his gloves creak as his hands curl into fists, and his face is tight, his face is –

His face is scored with scars like the bark of a gnarled winter tree, and his coat is red and not the color of ash, and the years have added lines of silver to his hair. But it is the same, it is the man from the painting, the parabola circles back, and Emily feels her back go stiff and feels each and every hair stand up on the back of her neck and she does _not know why_. She makes a noise, or something, she _must_ , because Daud looks at her. His eyes are as empty and studiously blank as the eyes of a shark. She feels as if she is being skewered. She feels as if she is being run through.

He bows.

“Your highness,” he murmurs. Short. Hint of _bitter_ still lacing his voice. The bow is perfunctory. He takes her small hand in his too-large one, pale against black glove, and the kiss that he gives the back of that hand is perfunctory too. Emily snatches her hand back as if she has been burned, forgetting all courtesy, but apart from a slight flicker in the eyes the man does not seem to notice.

(She sees Burrows watching from his office behind them, sees him turn sharp on his heel and vanish into the rooms behind, waving for a guard)

“Who are you?” Emily snaps.

And her voice, for the first time, is the voice of an Empress. Ice and cold.

“No one.” He gestures for her to walk down the stairs toward the door with him and Emily does, she _does_ , because she feels like a minnow caught in the gaze of a shark and because this man holds the answers to the demand that Burrows will not grant her. Because she can smell blood on the air. Or maybe it is merely the sea through the tall tower windows. “They’ve called me a crime boss,” he goes on, scorn heavy on the words. “Or a monster.”

“Sokolov doesn’t paint monsters,” is what she finds herself saying (because the _bitter_ in this man’s voice is sharp enough to cut). “I’ve seen the painting of you.”

“Yes, well. You’ve also seen the painting of the Regent.”

And it is fear, maybe, nerves, the utter absurdity of it all – but Emily laughs aloud.

The sound jangles in the empty air of the tower like bell-chimes. Daud grins. It cannot be called a true smile, not at all, more of a sideways slash of his mouth. “She said that about you,” he mutters, then raises his voice. “So how does the little Empress like her cage?”

And Burrows might hear, yes; but Emily cannot shake the fear of what will happen if she _lies_ to this man, and she does not falter in the slightest. “The _gilded_ part suits me just fine.”

“Foolish.”

She opens her mouth to ask for an explanation, all Empress indignance. But the _questions_ lodge in her throat and come tumbling out, _why is Burrows afraid of you_ phrasing itself as “what were you yelling about?”

“More foolishness.”

And Emily realizes that the _bitterness_ that this man wears like armor has eroded every last thread of artifice from him, sure as the gnawing waves of the sea. If he wears a mask, ever, at all, it is not the kind of mask that can be found at court. He will not lie to her. _He will not lie to her._

And she realizes (with a tumbling soaring _swoop_ in her chest and the inexplicable taste of blood and _wrongness_ in her mouth) that what he means by _foolish_ is that he will _tell her the truth._

 _Take me with you,_ she wants to shout as they approach the wide and looming doors to the courtyard. _Take me with you, take me to a ship where I can get away from all this, I don’t care if they call you a monster, I am sick of being lied to, I am sick of being called a fool because I am young and not because I am, I am the princess in the tower and I have waited far too long for rescue to care what face that rescue wears, I am sick of deception and games and politics and masks –_

As Daud lays his gloved hands flat against the tower doors to push them open, all the words are brilliant on her tongue.

And Emily never gets the chance to say them.

There is a man on the other side of the doors. And like all men in the tower, it is a man that Emily recognizes – though not one that she knows well. He is always sent away when she is sent to his domain. And she realizes, now, that what she told Daud was a lie: that Sokolov _does_ paint monsters, for she has _seen_ the painting of this man and imagined, oh, how she has imagined his sword cutting off Corvo’s head to the thunderous sound of the bells.

The Executioner makes no noise. No preamble and no game. His sword is _real_ , no rapier-wit, and he simply _lunges_. Emily leaps to the side, scream tearing from her throat –

And the lunge is not for her

And Daud is no longer _there_.

And the guards do not come running, it is as years before, the white courtyard is empty and blank and there is not a single guard in sight –

She is a child again and she presses back flat against the wall as the Executioner whirls when his blade finds nothing in the air, as Daud steps out of the air behind him and catches the slicing sword with his own. Turns it aside. His eyes are cold, _cold_. Blank as the eyes of a shark. Dark. His lip is curled and it is _contempt_ she reads in his face, and _fury_ , and the face of the Executioner burns with some sort of righteous religious _rage_ , the clang and crash of sword beats loud as bells and just as quick and _quicker_ –

Far too fast –

Emily is frozen, and time itself seems frozen around her. The wind is dead in the air and the roar of the sea is dull and distant and it is only these two men before her who move, flickering fast around each other in and out of emptiness, and their swords silver the air around them in a cage that is not gilded at all.

She cannot move.

Cannot move, cannot even scream ( _this time_ , not that she wants to), can only watch as it happens over again. The Executioner falters. The catch and glance of his sword is all wrong, slow, and Daud’s own shears down, and the man knifes over in pain as blood spurts red red _red_ from a bone-deep gash in his shoulder. And Daud catches him. Hand wrapped hard around his throat. Shoves him brutal and quick and efficient to brace him against the door. Shoves the sword in. And out. Red.

Emily cannot hear, but she knows that sound. She _knows_ the sound of a sword as it stabs past spine and rib and as her own scream hangs panicked on the morning air.

She knows.

As before, she can only watch as the man who murdered her mother steps into the air and vanishes. This time she sees him reappear; this time she sees him flicker into existence at the far end of the courtyard, glance back, kick the cover off a manhole and vanish down into the dark. There is not even a trail of blood to mark the path that he has taken. The cover slams back down into place. She is the only one who sees. It is the same, again, all over again.

And when the world begins again, this is what happens.

The tower springs to life. The guards are there again. The Executioner makes low and keening wordless sounds as he dies, as blood seeps out to flood the marble floor. It soaks her shoes as Emily steps past him and marches up. She leaves a bloody trail of tiny footprints up the stairs until she reaches the balcony where Burrows lords over it all, hunched as a vulture. He is unmoving, and his eyes are slitted in fury no lesser than that which burns on Emily’s tongue along with the taste of blood in the air. “Why didn’t you tell me?!” she screams at him. She stamps her feet. The blood she tracks on the carpets disrupts his precious _order. “Why didn’t you tell me?!”_

*****

_The Distillery District and surrounding areas are on lockdown following an incursion by the gang known as the Whalers. Anyone moving in said districts, or in the Flooded District, will be shot on sight._

*****

Jessamine’s grave is the most peaceful place within the bounds of the tower. The groundskeepers make sure it stays beautiful – that the stone is clean and pale, that the ivy twines up the pillars close as an embrace. The view is always lovely, but it is doubly so on nights like this: when the mist hangs low over the distant city and blurs the distant lights so that they look more like magic than ever, floating, and the moon glints silver on the tops of waves.

Those waves are far below, and the fall is long. Not quite as long as the drop into darkness in the gap between tower-roof and freedom. But long enough.

Emily sits on the low wall, toes dangling over, and considers the fact that she has no desire to leap at all. Not anymore.

None.

Not even after her outburst had whipped the tower into rumor, sent whispers of _mad, hysterical, uncontrollable, unreliable_ catching through the city like wildfire. It is the night before her sixteenth birthday – and on the morrow Emily will learn that Burrows will never surrender the rule to a woman that he has branded a _little girl._ Not after what she had screamed. Not after what she knows.

( _You knew!_ she’d shouted, after the curtains were drawn and the doors were locked so that the world outside heard only the _shouting_ and not the _truth_. _You knew! You lied! You worked with him. The man who killed my mother. You **hired** him. Didn’t you. **Didn’t you?** It was **you!**_

 _It was,_ Burrows had replied, cool, _a necessary lie_.)

It is not, Emily thinks, that she wishes to leap (though Burrows would undoubtedly _thank_ her, at least until the mobs came howling for his blood). It is not that she wishes to stop. No. She wishes to travel to a far distant corner of the isles where Empresses nearly never visit, and she wishes to sip her tea with no fear of it being poisoned and no suspicion that the man across from her flavors every word with deception, and she wishes to pick up the paper and read of Burrows dead and the city of Dunwall _burning_.

He has worked so hard to make sure she never had a hand in the rulership of this Empire. This only means that she does not _care_.

It has only assured that there is _bitterness_ now where there once sat apathy or acceptance, hard as armor and red as blood or a man’s red coat – where once she’d wanted to fall, now she wants to stand on high and watch it all come screaming down.

Emily sits on the edge of the cliff and imagines the pretty lights of the city in the fog turned red with destroying fire. Swings out her toes over the empty air and watches them flash back and forth, the sea below her so far _down_. Down and down and down.

She has searched the way _up_ for an escape, and found only a too-wide chasm leading to a long fall; and while the _fall_ , clearly, is not the way out, perhaps it is not as wrong as she thinks.

She considers.

And then she returns to her room and packs. Quietly. She takes only the things she will need for a trip across the city to the gateway of the docks. A whale-oil lamp that clips to her jacket, small and blue. A knife that slips inside the seam. Coin. A key to the tower that can be used to buy or bribe her way to sea; or that can be thrown into the sea as the ship pulls away from the tower and toward the southern sky.

And she stands in her room with her hair tucked back behind her ears and her mother’s clothes hemmed and tailored tight to her small frame, and she turns in a slow circle.

There is art all over the walls here, accumulated over long years. There are shaky drawings and paintings of the view from the tower, of the red-haired woman at the Golden Cat, of a fanciful leviathan breaching and upending a shipful of sailors into the ocean. There is a portrait of the two Pendleton brothers standing far apart with arms slung over shoulders and wide negative space between them, and a portrait of the three Ladies Boyle in matching suits of black and white and heart’s-blood red. A charcoal drawing of Sokolov hunched and contented over his work. A child’s sketch of a man with an eyepatch and a slash across his face, grinning. A portrait of Waverly with a small and secret smile.

There are no paintings of Burrows (by choice) and none of Corvo (not so much); and there are many, many paintings of Jessamine. The lines get more solid over the years, the proportions and the shadows become correct, the title at the foot of the frame changes from _Mummy_ to _Mother_ to things more professional. Jessamine changes, as well. In some of the later portraits she begins to look like the Sokolov painting. In one of them there is a shade of Waverly Boyle in her face.

In one of them she looks precisely how Emily remembers her, and the red is as red as red can be.

Emily stands in the center of her room with all her precious drawings staring back at her from the walls. And she does not touch them. They belonged to a little girl who dreamed of being Empress. They belonged to a little girl they never allowed her to be.

She locks the door behind her when she leaves.

She nods to guards as she passes, murmurs pretty lies about _fresh night air_ and _walks to clear her head_. She has spent long enough watching from the roof of the tower, now, that she knows all their patrol routes. The places they look. The places they do not. And so it is in one of these spaces where they do not watch that Emily creeps her way across the courtyard, small and scuttling as the rats she’s studied so well, and lifts up the manhole cover through which Daud had vanished.

And she vanishes as well.

Down into the dark.

The cover clangs shut behind her, loud as a slamming door; but she can see ledges looping downwards into further darkness, and the lamp on her hip lights the way.

On the morrow, Emily will turn sixteen and Burrows will be required to abdicate the rule. On the morrow, Dunwall will awake to discover that it has no Empress. The chaos will come again. The city will weep and riot and burn. And on the morrow, Emily will be on a ship to Morley or Pandyssia or Serkonos. And she will not be looking back.


	2. Chapter 2

_Report any sightings of the Masked Felon to the City Watch at once. This man has disrupted the peace and sowed insurrection all across our great city. He is considered armed and dangerous. Do not approach him at any cost._

******

All the chill of the tower dungeon and all the creaky tattered opulence of the Golden Cat could _never_ have prepared her for the sewer.

It is wet.

And dark.

And freezing.

And _utterly disgusting._

She has no idea where she is; knowing her luck, she is probably turned around and heading for the sea. Her socks are ruined and her shoes probably are as well, and her trousers will never be the same. She spends an hour stumbling through the same dark passage as it twists and turns and branches into new tributaries, hand to a slimy wall to keep herself grounded. The air is fetid. The breath in her throat wants to turn into sobs, and once it nearly does – she stops, bends double, gasps for a while, but nothing comes up and she sets her jaw and continues.

She is an _Empress_. If this is the price of freedom, she will pay it a thousand times over.

The rats stream past her, sea of sleek fur in black and white, and her shoes slip on their droppings but she does not fall. And they do not bite. The rats have to be eating something, Emily reasons – there must be a source of food ahead, and even if it is only a plague-body pit it will lead to _daylight_. Even rats cannot survive on darkness and the sea. She follows them down and down and down.

And out.

She smells the daylight before she sees it, fresh air, cool and clean. And the light shining through the rotted grate at the end of the tunnel is cool as well. Emily throws her shoulder against said grate, smears her coat with streaks of rust, pushes with what little weight she has until it tumbles off with a rush and sends her tumbling down (water, rats and all) to land in the mud in the back of a Dunwall alley. She spits, pulls herself to her knees with a horrible _squelch_ , and looks up.

The light slanting down through the buildings from above is the white light of midday.

Emily curses, softly, some Tyvian expression that she’s heard Sokolov use late at night. They will have already missed her in the tower. Burrows will have sent guard patrols searching top to bottom; but it cannot be long before he determines that she’s gone, before he sends out guards to fetch her back, before the announcements ring over the loudspeaker and the city begins to paper itself in wanted posters bearing copies of her face.

“Dammit,” she tells the rats that sniff around her feet. She curls her little fingers in the muck. “Dammit, dammit, _dammit_.”

The rats, of course, make no reply. And so Emily clambers to her feet, straightens, tries to lift her chin and put the proper Empress steel in her spine and brush the worst of the worst of Dunwall’s sewers off her coat. There is nothing to it, then. She must get moving. She has a ship to catch. A life to live. She catches sight of her face in a puddle and nods in approval (and winces) to find that it is smeared with filth, black, her hair in disarray: this is all the disguise she will need.

Nothing to it at all.

She steps out into the streets in the mask of a poor urchin whom no one will notice or stop or arrest, who knows the city like the back of her hand and who can march unobstructed straight down to the docks – and she discovers (maps on the walls of the Regent’s office be damned) that the street signs give names she does not recognize. That the tall grey buildings are indistinguishable from one another, hide all landmarks, give no answers. That she has no idea where she is.

Well, then.

Emily presses her lips tight together and marches up to the first man she sees (a cap pulled low over his hair and a tired slump to his shoulders). “Sir?” she begins. “Sir, could you tell me – which way to the do-”

He looks at her. And he does not look at her. He looks at the grime and stench of the sewer clinging to her skin – and he turns away without a second glance. His shoulders hunch further and she can swear, in the instant before his eyes turned away, that he’d looked too closely at her face; that he’d mouthed the word _Weeper_.

(She has heard rumors that those the plague has not yet taken still eke out some kind of mad existence beneath the city. It had not occurred to her that she might run into one. That she is lucky. It had not occurred to her that, even with no blood streaming down her cheeks, she might be _taken_ for one)

She bites her lip, turns in a circle, approaches a dark-haired girl in the clothes of a maid hurrying down the other side of the street. “Miss, do you know which way to the docks -?”

No.

No one.

They do not look at her. They look at her clothes and her hair and her skin, the lines of rust on her jacket like the marks of claws, the muck splashing her trousers, the _squelch_ with each step of her shoes. Emily has spent her life learning how to listen and spy, be small and scuttling as a rat, but it was always a part she could take off. A lie. A mask. This is for true. This is utterly ridiculous _. Don’t you know who I am?_ she wants to shout. _Don’t any of you care?_

( _No_ , say the people, with eyes sliding off like oil slick. _No, no, no_ )

She stands in the street with fists clenched and heart blazing – and that is when she hears the tramp of boots in a steady, steady march.

The guards move in patrols of three, and they are _looking_ , she can see, they are watching ever so closely – she sees one of them grab the maid she had stopped before, the girl with hair as dark as Emily’s own, and hold her by the shoulders for a second. Study her face. Let her go and keep looking, looking, marching down the street.

Emily turns, and flees.

*****

_Attention! Your Empress Emily Kaldwin is alone somewhere in the city. Anyone who can provide information on her location will be richly rewarded. The Empress’s safety is our top priority._

******

She has no idea where she is, but the shops are growing run-down and boarded-up enough around her that she doubts people here will look twice at girl who looks like she’s just run from a Weeper cave. She flattens herself against an alleyway wall as a guard patrol goes past, hand to a stitch in her side, catching her breath. Running is silly, stupid, obvious, but it is hard to do anything else.

When the boots have faded to a mere drumbeat in the distance, Emily ducks out of the alley and into the door of the first shop she sees. _Griff and Sons’ General Goods_ , the marquee outside reads. It will have to do.

The bell rings, and the young man behind the counter looks up. His eyes narrow and his arm begins to rise and point _out_ –

“Wait,” says Emily, “ _wait_. Please. I’m not sick.” Steel in her voice. She straightens. She reaches into her pocket and the coins are cool in her hand, shining against the film of dirt. “I need to wash, and I need new clothes, I’m willing to pay –”

Surprise is naked on the young man’s face, and he does little to mask it. He comes around the counter and studies the coins. Takes them all from her hand in one quick snatch.

“Is that enough?” she asks.

“Yeah.” He rubs at the back of his neck. “Yeah, that’ll be enough.”

 _It is too much_ , is what she reads on his face as plain as the light of day. And her heart sinks into her muck-heavy shoes. She is royalty, after all – she has never bought something for herself. She has never _bargained_ like this, where the terms are fixed, where payment is given in plain coin rather than promises or the intricate dances of politics. She _would_ fight, wheedle and persuade the bulk of her money back; but this is not the breed of man she is used to working with and she has no idea where to begin.

Emily swallows, hard, and shifts from foot to foot. And the gesture is one of a little girl.

The man (who’s name is Griff, she learns, like his father before him – _died of plague a month before the vaccine came out and left me the shop,_ he’d groused, _the bastard, I wanted to be a whaler_ ) leads her to a little room in the back with a sink. Lets her splash water on her face and scrub the worst of the sewers away with her fingers as he goes to look for old towels. The water is freezing cold, shocking. When she drinks some of it, she discovers that it tastes like tin. The face she pulls in the mirror is foul.

“What did you say your name was?” he calls from across the shop.

“I didn’t.” Outsider’s _Eyes_ , there’s mud in her teeth. “Waverly.”

“Waverly, huh. One of those rich bitches up in the Estate District is named Waverly. You named after her?”

“Maybe?”

“Huh. Where are you from?”

“Clavering Boulevard.” Her memories of the area are distant, gilded over, all childhood innocence and the opulence of the Golden Cat, and the view from her window of the neighborhood below had been narrow. But it’s the only view of the city she has. It is likely the only neighborhood she can speak of with any hope of truth – and Emily’s heart sinks _past_ her shoes and into the floorboards when she hears Griff (son of Griff) make a noise of surprise.

“Clavering,” he repeats, and she can hear the way he’s rubbing a hand over his stubbled chin. “That’s Whaler territory now, that is. Everyone with money ran out when they closed down the Cat, and the scum moved in. Where’s your family, dear?”

“G-gone.” She thinks of Jessamine. Thinks of Corvo. “Murdered.”

“I’m sorry.” He returns with a ragged scrap of a towel. He studies her face as he hands it to her, eyes narrow, sucking on his lower lip. “You wash up. I’ll go see about finding some clothes so you can look like a proper lady again.”

“I’m not –”

But the door closes in her face. Emily stands there, holding the towel, shivering in the cool air from a narrow window up above, _I’m not a lady_ hanging on her tongue. She bites her lip, and she wets the towel and begins to wipe the worst of the filth from her hair and her skin, and she keeps her ears pricked for sounds outside. She can hear Griff moving about the shop and the tramp of another guard patrol out on the street. And the air outside the window-vent high in the wall shakes with the announcement of _Emily Kaldwin is out in the city, reward offered for information._

She wipes furiously at the rust on her mother’s jacket – but the scuff of cloth on rough cloth is loud, and she almost misses the tinkle of the shop’s bell as the door opens. If she didn’t know how to _listen_ she wouldn’t have heard at all.

“Officers,” Griff murmurs, quiet, “’scuse me, but I’ve got a girl here, seems a bit suspicious. She’s the right age so I thought you might as well –”

The bathroom window is high. But Emily has spent nights scaling the walls and roofs of Dunwall Tower, and she knows precisely how to jump and how to scramble like a rat – and she does. The dull glass scrapes and tears across her back as she worms her way out, but she is out and she is free and the thunder of the warrant for her capture drones in the air to drown out the sound of her dropping into the alleyway and running away.

*****

_Empress Emily, if you can hear this, please return to the tower. Your safety and the safety of the Empire are one and the same. You are endangering us all._

*****

 _You are endangering us all,_ complains the announcer as the day goes on and the shadows shift to those of evening. Emily can imagine the man in his tower within the tower: harried, ten empty cups of tea at his elbow and hair standing on end. It is the only pang of sorrow for that world that she allows herself to feel. _You are endangering us all_ , he repeats, repeating what Burrows is doubtless shouting over his shoulder.

_(You are acting like a child)_

“So what if I am?” she mutters, feet squelching through back-alley puddles. “It’s not my fault. You never allowed me to be one.”

Her voice sullen. Raw. Unladylike. But Emily cannot bring herself to care.

She has learned (through asking, through wheedling, though finding a boy as ragged as she and paying him a shiny silver coin) that she is on the wrong side of the Wrenhaven. The docks, the ships that are large enough to sail to sea and bear her far away – they are all on the other side of the river. And Kaldwin’s Bridge is the largest and the safest crossing and will be swarmed with guards; and all the others are closer to where she is, yes, and smaller, and _abandoned_ , flooded and leading straight through the heart of districts that were surrendered to plague and floods and fire and violence long ago.

At least now, she thinks (with Sokolov’s Tyvian curses bitter on her tongue) she knows which way she needs to go. Which direction the river even _is_. She could probably catch a small boat, even; but she remembers Griff, and she can think of no way that this would end without either her ransomed return to the tower or the splash of her small corpse into the grave of the river. No. She will walk there, and she will figure it out when she gets there.

It is better than nothing.

It is better than going back.

It is night, and she is shivering, and the shadows are long, and she reads the streetsigns to learn that the river is a long, long way away. She walks. Her feet ache. She’s smeared dirt over her features again to disguise them (she thinks, with a bitter smile, of delicately-applied paints on the faces of the Ladies Boyle that serve the same purpose), and her head is bent to shroud her face with her dark hair. She makes herself as hidden as can be.

She keeps half an eye out for the City Watch patrols that fan out through the streets, and she begins to take to the roofs to avoid them.

It is more difficult than she had imagined. The city has been broken down and reshaped in the past eight or ten years, shoved into new patterns to accommodate the rails of armored cars and the long legs of Tallboys. Barricades stopper all major streets. In years past they would have crackled with blue fire; but now the whales are scarce and the fire is dark and the Walls of Light sit inactive, rusting, steel turning to red and bronze to black and brilliant copper to green.

Emily is crouched on a rooftop across the avenue from one such broken checkpoint, biting her lip. The gap across is long – not so long as twenty meters, not so long as the moated _fall_ surrounding Dunwall Tower, but long enough. And the arch of the gate below is framed by a group of guards. Three. This is a bad neighborhood (close to Clavering, close to the neighborhood she almost _knew_ before it fell to crime in recent months), and their crisp-press uniforms stand in stark contrast to the grunge and grey. She keeps them in the corner of her eye as she toes the edge of a gutter.

There is a wire stretched across. She can make it. She can.

She reaches up, high; and the wire sways and shakes off drops of water from the early-morning mist. They spatter on the ground below. The sound is loud, and Emily freezes.

And the guards look up.

She makes herself small as a rat and prays they have never worked at the Tower and do not know her face.

“Hey, wossat?”

“Nothing.” Bark of a laugh. They are two stories below her and still Emily can _smell_ the fume of whiskey. “Urchins aren’t worth chasing. We’re here to stop the Empress, not rats like that.”

“Nah.” Clack of boots on stone as the first man approaches. “It’s a girl. Hey, girl!”

Emily takes a deep breath and curls her hands tight around the wire to pull herself up.

“Girl!”

A _crack_. Loud. Echo across the sides of buildings. The wire vibrates in her hands in the wake of the bullet’s passing, drops of water shivering off, and Emily goes as stiff as if she’s been caught in a spotlight and bites down on her scream. She looks down to see the guard lower his gun, jab it at the ground. “Get _down_ here.”

She does.

Her hands search out the imprint of the knife stowed in the hem of her jacket when she finds her feet. The guard is watching her. His eyes and the eyes of the two others are dark under beetle-brows and their hands are nearly the hands of dockworkers, large and callused, and the half-light does the no favors. Emily thinks of Waverly’s lessons and her insistence that the aristocracy were the ones she had to fear, that men will bend to subtlety. And that may be true, it may, it _may_ –

She backs against the wall, gropes to the side, and curls her fingers around the first heavy thing she finds. It is a plank of rotted wood, not nearly so elegant or balanced as a lady’s walking stick, and Emily grips it hard and lifts her chin as the three approach her.

“Smart girl,” smiles the one who shot at her. He turns to his fellows. “See? How old do you think she is, eh? Sixteen, seventeen?”

“Let me pass, please.”

“About the age of the missing Empress, amirite? Should ask her what it’s worth to not round her up – ”

“Gentlemen,” she says as she steps forward with chin high and hand wrapped tight around the plank, cool (and it is the wrong word, it earns a laugh), “I’m not who you’re looking for, and if you’d be so kind as to –”

One of them grabs her. Arms at her shoulders. Mockery of an embrace. The breath in her ear _reeks_ , whiskey, and Emily yells as she knees him hard in the middle as she’s been taught. She has no idea if the blow lands true or if she hits only simple _fat_ , but her knees are all bone and the man gives an _oof_ , lets her twist and duck out and under and free and she spins. Whirls. The plank is heaver than a noble lady’s cane and does not swing the same way, goes wide, _unbalances_ her and the hand hits her straight across the face –

“Hey!”

And she’s sent reeling back. Stumbling dazed against the bricks. But there is no one on her, no sword through the stomach or disgusting weight pinning her to the wall. And that voice that’s shouted – a woman’s voice. _Why_ does she know that voice?

“Hey! Off, you louts! Get off my girl!”

A loud crack. A whimper that follows.

Ah.

 _That_ is the sound of a lady’s cane cracking over flesh.

The guards scurry off. Sound of running feet. And the shout that one of them gives back is “dammit, sorry, Madame, sorry, _shit_ – ”

And the hand that pulls Emily to her feet is encrusted with gaudy oversized rings. Emily’s fingers find the holes in them before she’s let go, feel out the empty sockets where the jewels have been torn away and pawned. The woman who stands before her is as stiff-backed as the twisted cane she holds, and her face is ugly with wrinkles, and the tattered scraps of purple satin and cheap lace that cling to her are spotted and torn and filthy at the hems. The years have not been kind to her. But her hair is still the same horrible artificial red as ever.

“Come with me,” Madame Prudence snaps.

And Emily has little choice but to follow her away from the checkpoint and into the shadows that lead behind the alley.

Prudence limps. She leans heavy on her cane, and Emily has to hide the way her mouth wants to turn up in a cruel little smile at the image. The woman may have saved her now, yes; but she remembers the faces of girls floating down the Wrenhaven with strangle-bruises ‘round their throats, and she keeps a careful few steps behind and keeps her fingers tight around her plank of wood. Prudence glances back at her, once. “You can let go of that now.”

Emily looks down. There are nails sticking out of the end. Silver and shining. Not even painted with rust. Very sharp. A chill goes down her spine; she had not even noticed. “No,” she says, “no, I think I’ll keep it.”

“Smart.” The cane makes an unsteady clack on the cobbles. “You know how things work in this neighborhood, girl? I run the streets here. And I’m the best Madame in the business, used to run the Cat up on Clavering  before the damn Regent rigged that health inspection. So. I run things here, understand? I keep the men off girls like you. Girls who look like they need a second chance. And then I give them that chance. Understand?”

Emily swallows, hard, swallows down the scream or the fury that wants to get caught in her throat. “So that’s why you said I was _your girl_ ,” she manages.

“You understand. You _are_ a smart one.”

She thinks of the three men’s uniforms so crisp and new in contrast to the decay here. Just another kind of lie. “But,” she begins, question stupid and childish on her tongue, “those were _guards_ –”

“And you’re a _smart_ girl. Come on. The Watch doesn’t control the city, any more than the Regent controls that little Empress. Obviously.” Prudence’s voice is hard. “Fuck him. No. _I_ run the streets here.” _Click clack_ as the cane stops, as Prudence stops and turns next to the sputter of a fire. “Come here, girl. Let’s have a look.”

Emily steps up. Her fingernails dig into the rot of the wood; Prudence’s nails dig into her flesh as she grabs her chin and tilts her head first to one side, then the other, eyes narrow behind their mask of paint. And then Emily sees her eyes go wide.

“Shit,” she snarls, stepping back. “It’s _you_.” A laugh that breaks bitter on the air. “Tower wasn’t fancy enough for you, _Empress_ Emily? Had to come down here with the rest of us?”

“I’m not –”

“Oh, don’t lie to me, I’m not stupid. I didn’t keep you secret under an entire city’s nose for nine months by being stupid.” Prudence spits. “You ruined me, girl, you know that?”

Emily’s lips are tight and bloodless _. Empress_ , she reminds herself, _Empress_. All the lessons she has learned. Kindness and calm and steel. “How?”

“Don’t _how_ me, _girl_. That vulture Burrows set me up for life as long as I kept my tongue. Even rebuilt us after that stupid Admiral blew everything to pieces. The Cat was the only real brothel on this side of the river by the time he was done with all his tax-cuts. All his little deals. And then just a few weeks ago he decides he’s _done_ , he’s finished, doesn’t like loose ends, paranoid old buzzard, and here I am down in the gutter with my girls fucking men under the docks! If I had evidence –”

“I’m sorry,” says Emily. It’s an expert lie. There is no _sorry_ in the word. _You miserable woman_ , she wants to scream, _you horrible monster of a woman, I saw two corpses drift down the river on account of me because of you. I was child._ She wets her dry lips. “I don’t see how any of this is my fault.”

“Of course it’s your fault. I took you under my roof, didn’t I?”

“I was seven.” Her voice is level. “Take it up with the Lord Regent.”

And she turns on her heel to go.

“No,” Prudence snarls. “ _No_.” Her hands are sharp as vulture claws in Emily’s shoulder, digging into fabric and flesh and turning her around. “I should have been set up for life with you. I turned that entire business upside down to hide a silly little girl who kept crying for her mother –”

“You killed two women because of me!”

“Miserable, lazy, worthless little snitches, I would have killed them all! You should have set me up for _life!_ Look at you!” Prudence laughs. It is an ugly sound, torn and ragged. Her eyes pass down and over Emily’s body. “What are you, sixteen today? And what were you were _what_ back then - seven, eight? You look older than you are, I _swear_ , if I’d had you for another five or six years, the _money_ I could have made off you – I can do it now – I’d have men lining up outside the door and paying in pure gold to fuck the rightful Empress –”

And this is what Emily learns, very quickly:

A wet and solid plank of wood does not make the same sound as a cane when it cracks against a woman’s skull, and it does not sit in her small hand the way a knife or a sword does. It is heavier, blunter. Cruder. It wrenches out of her grip as Prudence crumples to the ground. Her mouth is open in a painted _O_ , and her eyes are wide.

And one of them is no longer quite an eye.

The hindmost nail has gone into the soft bone of her temple and come out there, and her eye is just a broken smear of white against the red-streaked steel.

Emily scrambles back, foot over foot, half-tripping. What little is left in her stomach threatens to come up as Prudence lies there twitching on the floor. As the twitching stills, and the broken gurgling sounds from her throat stop. As the alley grows silent again, until is only the chirp of rats somewhere in the distance and the steady, soft sound of blood dribbling into the floor.

No sound at all.

Just that; and a low dry cackle coming out of the dark.

“She thought she ruled the streets here,” says the old woman who steps out of the shadows. She is hunched and skeletal under her filthy furs. Her eyes, unlike Prudence’s now, are round and whole. But they are both white as the face of the moon, and when they turn to look toward Emily she finds nothing reflected back in them. “Poor lady. Poor dearie. Always wrong, wasn’t she?”

*****

_Attention, citizens of Dunwall: the entire city is now under mandatory curfew. Please report any suspicious activity at once. Be vigilant._

*****

Emily is not surprised to find that the woman serves her tea.

She is only surprised when the tea arrives to find that it is _not_ – that the woman has no tea at all, that the liquid in the cups is only river water, boiling.

It is probably just as well. The little house is filthy. She can hear rats down below, tearing at Prudence’s corpse and spattering the cellar walls with gore. There is mold streaking the wallpaper and horrible stains on the ceiling above, and Emily does not want to think about the state of anything in this woman’s pantry.

But it is a _house_ , and tea is tea (even if it is not), and the woman does not seem keen on handing her to guards and has an extra bed. She will stay here for the night. She will ignore the corpse in the cellar and the glitter of dead blind eyes, and she will drink her dangerous brew. There are far, far worse places she could be.

“Thank you,” she murmurs. The teacup, at least, gives her something to hold and hide the shaking of her hands. She touches the top of her lip to the steaming water, and burns it. “Who are you?”

It is the seventh or eighth time that she has asked.

“No one, dearie,” the old woman sing-songs. She sashays around the kitchen, busies herself cleaning things that can never be made clean. “No one, no one. Oh, but I know who you are, dearie.”

Cold in the pit of Emily’s stomach, again, in perfect contrast to her stinging lip. “You do?”

“Of course.” The woman reaches under the sink and rummages for something, there, a large metal box that she draws out with both hands. “You’re the birthday girl. You’ve missed your party for so long, Granny’s been so lonely, I’ve had to eat the cake all by myself these past seven years. Or is it nine? I can never tell. But now you’re here. I have a gift for you. See. See?”

The box shakes the table as she sets it down and Emily stands, begins to protest as she had when the woman had proposed every single thing ( _come to my house, help me carry the body, feed the birdies, have some tea, aren’t the birdies beautiful?)._ But the woman freezes her with a dead-white stare.

( _The birdies_ , she’d said, lifting Prudence’s corpse over her shoulder like it was nothing, the board in the dead woman’s skull _clanging_ against the wall with each step down. _The birdies are always so hungry_.)

“I’ve kept it safe for you,” she murmurs as she undoes the latches. “I’ve kept it warm. See?” She lifts wads of cloth away from the top of the case, sets them aside. Padding. The cloth is (Emily notes, with further inspection and another chill) a man’s clothes: checked pink pants, a jacket, a soft yellow shirt spattered with dark stains. “See,” says the witch, turning the box around, “see?”

Emily sees.

She is an Empress. She is no inventor, nor soldier, no connoisseur of weapons of war. But the small armory in the case before her is _exquisite_. It has been kept free of rust or damp, and it gleams against the lining of the box: grenades and bits of coiled wire, a small and polished pistol, a crossbow that is light enough to be held in even her small hand. She reaches into the box and grabs a thing of metal, folded over, wraps her hands around the slender hilt and flicks her wrist. The sword unfolds. It is no heavier than her little knife, no greater or less in weight or heft than the delicate canes she’s trained with, and the edge is as sharp as an edge can be.

She catches sight of her shadow thrown up against the wall. She is small, narrow, and the blade of the sword is narrower still. Alike. Her shadow has no expression, no wonder or fear. It is all solid lines. It looks like it belongs.

Emily holds the sword, and closes her eyes, and tries a practice thrust – up and through and out between imaginary ribs.

It sits so well in her hand.

She looks back in the box. And there is a note, there – she draws it forth with her left hand, because her right seems unwilling to leave the sword and unwilling to let it go so soon. The note is stiffly folded and fragile and had clearly been drawn forth from the river at some point in is existence, because she cannot read half of it for mold and spots and melted ink. _Your supplies_ , it reads in a spidery hand. _I am still constructing your mask, but it will be ready when you arrive. The mask of a master assassin._

“That’s it, dearie,” says the old woman (as if she can read, as if she can see). “Ask the boy about the rest. The boy with the face. Pretty face. Nasty boy.”

Emily isn’t listening.

The note is signed _P_ , and this initial she does not know. And the name to whom the note is addressed is blurred. Nigh illegible. Emily squints.

 _C_ , she reads.

_C_

_o_

“Where did you get this?” she asks; and she _swears_ that the shaking in her voice has nothing to do with the name at all.

“He showed it to me,” says the woman. She sounds so pleased. “It washed into the sewers after everything fell apart, and that would have been such a waste, wouldn’t it? So he showed me how to find it. The pretty one.”

“He?”

But the old witch only shakes her head. She rests a knit-gloved hand on Emily’s shoulder, shows her how to flick her wrist so that the sword folds back as quiet as a whisper. “It’s late, dearie, it’s time for bed. If you don’t go to bed you won’t have bad dreams. Hush.”

“I – ”

“Hush, hush. Granny knows best. Follow me. I’ve got another present under your pillow.”

What Emily finds under her pillow is no sword, though. No knife, no crossbow, no grenade. No note that she can read, bearing the name _Corvo_ in letters that burn across the years. No.

She finds only a pale circle of white bone, unadorned and bare save for a design etched out in black. It is a sign she recognizes but does not _know_. She has seen it in one of the Overseers’ books, maybe. In Sokolov’s lab. In graffiti along the sewer walls. Somewhere. Nowhere. Her fingers trace the lines, find the circle and follow it to the center, touch and worry at it as if it is whirlpool drawing her in.

(Such a silly thought)

It is beautiful.

Her hands curl tight around it as she slowly falls to sleep in the rickety and creaky bed. Fingers laced tight. Arms tucked close. Bone pressed tight to beating heart.

*****

_Kaldwin’s Bridge is closed to all pedestrian traffic until further notice. Repeat, Kaldwin’s Bridge is closed to all pedestrian traffic._

*****

_“No.”_

“No?” The Outsider cocks his head. The gesture is that of a bird; but it is not that of a vulture like Burrows, looming and possessing. It is all curiosity. Around him, the air bends and swirls as if it is water. Emily stands on the precipice of what had previously been the landing of the small and filthy flat, awaiting the long, long fall. Her arms are crossed hard over her heart. “No?” he repeats, and his voice is so reasonable. “But you haven’t even heard what I’m offering.”

“I know who you are,” she snaps.

This is not, precisely, the _point_. It is not why she refuses. But it is a perfectly valid reason for refusal in its own right.

“And I know you,” the Outsider replies, easy. “Empress Emily Kaldwin. Your little life would have been so different had one man made it to the river. He got so close before they slammed the door closed and dragged him screaming back into his cell. He would have been so proud of you if he knew all that you’ve survived, and done, and tried to do.” He clasps his hands behind his back, and she sees the images ripple around her, all: scenes of Corvo appearing in her room at the Golden Cat as she’d dreamed long ago, bending to embrace her childhood self. But in this vision his face is a skull.

He is dead, he is rotted, he is gone.

Emily squeezes her eyes shut hard. “I don’t want to see. I don’t want to look back.”

“Only forward?”

She nods, tight.

The Outsider sighs. Quiet as the wind ruffling the white peaks of waves. When she opens her eyes the visions are gone around her, and the Void is empty and blue once more. “I have two gifts for you, my dear, to go with those from Granny Rags.”

“I don’t –”

And the Void pulses with a beat as steady and irresistible as the pounding of bells above Holger Square.

“The heart,” says the Outsider, “of a living thing.”

It appears between her unwilling hands, even as she tries to clench them into fists and curl them away, and she almost drops it. The flesh is hot against her own. The metal is cold. It beats, steady, a thrum against her fingers, and Emily can hear something brush against the edges of her mind and ear as if she’s hearing a voice from another room.

 _He has waited for you,_ says the voice held cradled between her hands. A woman’s voice. Cool. Familiar. Something she heard in a dream, a kinder dream? _We have both waited for you._

“Wh-who is this?”

“She was not,” the Outsider says by way of an answer that isn’t an answer at all, “intended for you.”

Emily wishes to push the human heart away, to give it back, to throw it into the shifting tides of the world that swirls around them both. Instead she finds herself drawing it close to her chest. She finds herself pressing it tight to the beat of her own heart, frantic fast between her ribs.

They synch.

Perfectly.

When Emily speaks, all the steel is gone, and her voice is the voice of a little girl who misses her mother in the dark.

“And the…” she tries again, wets her lips, heart hammering hard in her chest and her hands. “The second gift.” She looks down. “If this is your idea of a gift, I don’t – I don’t want it.”

“You don’t even know what I’m offering.”

“I do. Sokolov teaches – he says you’d offer me power.” She swallows hard. “They’ve done research. There are stories of men who can control the wind and the waves, see through the eyes of moths. I’ve seen a man who can stop time. I’ve seen him step through the thin air. I know what you can give me.” She steadies herself. The heart in her hands was once alive, she thinks fiercely; there is no telling what this being will ask in price, what she will be required to pay. And she is _done_ with paying. “I don’t want it.”

“I can give you everything you want. I can give you the power to make all your problems go away. _You_ would do it. Not me.”

“Are you listening?” She lifts her chin. “What would you make me do in return?”

“I ask only,” says the Outsider, spreading empty hands wide, “that you continue to be what you are.”

“I am done _being_ things for other men,” she says. Her voice is not the voice of a child. Her voice is not the voice of a puppet. Or an Empress. Her voice is only, only her own. “I will only be things for _me_. I say _no_.”

The being in the shape of a black-eyed man looks at her, just looks. And she can read his face as simply as she can read the faces of all men. His eyebrows are raised and the light is dancing bright in black black eyes, and he wears _surprise_ so inelegantly. It is not an expression that sits comfortably on his face. “I would have come to Corvo because he was nothing,” he muses, that same faint wonder lacing his voice. Thin threads of laughter. “Because he was a vessel to be filled, an arrow to be aimed and pointed. Because he bent himself toward others as if he was a tide and they the moon, as if they were the sun around which he revolved. You, on the other hand – you _are_ that sun. You are sick of men who seek to lean on you. You simply _burn_.”

“Stop it,” Emily hisses. Hands clenched to fists. Heart clutched tight in hands. “Stop it. No. I will do nothing for you. I will _be_ nothing for you.”

“My dear – ”

“I will live the rest of my life for myself and I will _make my way_ myself, _do you understand me?!”_

He does.

It happens anyway: the white burn on her skin, the lines on her flesh. The long fall into empty air that is as devouring as a chasm between gate and freedom that she can now leap _out_ of, land lightly on a ledge propelled by magic alone. She teeters, almost falls. The Outsider offers a hand to catch her but she shoves it away, steadies herself against the walls of the Void and stands tall.

 _Little Emily dreamed of being a princess in a tower_ , whispers the heart in her hand, exulting. _Oh, to have such foolish dreams again!_

*****

_All boat traffic exiting the city is to be monitored closely. Citizens are encouraged to report any suspicious boats on the Wrenhaven._

*****

“He came,” says Granny Rags, over a breakfast of thick bread and jam and boiling water. Her smile lights the house. “Did he dance with you? Was it lovely?”

“No.” Emily presses her hand to the nape of her neck, digs her nails into the skin. When she’d woken and twisted to look at her reflection in the mirror she’d seen the design on her flesh as she’d known she would, black under the fall of her dark hair. Stark and solid. “No.”

“He danced with me,” the woman preens.

That is not what she means at all.

Emily looks down, away from the old woman’s wide smile. Rubs at the back of her neck. When she paints, sometimes, it is like she can feel out the picture in the canvas before her brush even touches, and that is what it is like now – threads of magic all around her, singing out to be pulled on, picked up, used.

She wonders how they will use her back.

( _You will thank me,_ the black-eyed man had said, before he and the dream had melted away into nothingness. _I don’t do this to harm or shackle you. I do it to give you what you need to leap._

 _No_ , she had wanted to scream. Wanted to watch the words hammer into the blue blue air and break it like glass. _Liar, liar, liar._

She should know. She is one too.)

 “I need,” says Emily, “to get across the river.”

“Why?”

“To get to the docks. To take a ship away.”

“Why?”

“I need to get away. I’m done with it all. I’m done with being used.”

“I knew a boy who was done, too,” Granny Rags murmurs. She gathers up the dishes and begins to wash them, dirtying dishes and gloves both with rust-flecked river water. “Done and sick. He’s hid for years and years and years, he has. Hides but he can’t hide. Oh no. It doesn’t work. You two could be friends.” Her face twists, voice gone harsh and sharp as a paring knife. “Pretty face. Nasty boy.”

Emily pinches the bridge of her nose. “Do you have any idea how I could safely get across the river?”

“Of course, dearie. Of course. Granny knows everything.”

 _She speaks in truths that are covered with cobwebs_ , says the heart, when Emily brushes her fingertips against it in her pocket. It swells as if seeking her out. _Her mind is like a pantry. Covered with dust and the droppings of mice. But there are such sweets when you open the jars._

And so she decides that she can trust this witch a little while longer.

Granny Rags leads her down, step by tottering step, down a rickety staircase that lists to the side and leads over water where lantern-jawed fish eye them from below. At the base of the staircase is a lantern in truth. At the base of the lantern is a boat, silver, small, and the man who sits in it is slumped and white-haired and gives Emily an honest smile.

 _He named his boat for remembrance,_ murmurs the heart. _For the woman he loved, and the flower that binds all wounds._

“I heard a rumor there’d be someone down here,” says the man. He doffs his cap. Takes Emily’s small hand in his wrinkled one and guides her into the boat. She settles down across from him, sword balanced and clutched tight across her lap, and if the man notices or cares he makes no comment. “Where to, Miss?”

The morning is misty. The river is draped in white. They are far out in the water by the time Emily remembers herself enough to answer; the other shore is veiled, hidden, too far out to be seen.

*****

_For your safety, the plague-era laws regarding demonstrations and rioting are now in effect. Please trust in the judgment and vigilance of the City Watch._

*****

His name is Samuel, and he does not care if Emily will not give her own. He has been piloting his boat in the fringes of the Wrenhaven and the small caves and coves along the coast for years, and the patrols and searchlights of the guards are no challenge for him. The motor of the boat is a steady thrum as he takes them through a canal that had once been a carriage house before the river came rushing in. Beams pass just over their heads. Even the noise of the announcer outside is muffled, distant, only threading in through broken skylights high above.

It is the first stretch in a long while that the way is straight and even. He  takes his hand off the rudder for a moment, takes off his great and grey-brown coat and drapes it over her shoulders.

“No,” Emily protests, “I can’t –”

“I’ve had lots of different types of people in this boat, and I can always tell which ones are used to the chill and which ones are freezing and trying not to show it.” He smiles at her. It is the most honest smile she has seen, probably, in ten years. “I’ve been on this river since you were born. It seems to me like you need that more than I do.”

 _I will ask you for nothing in return,_ is what that smile says. Emily finds herself looking at the floor of the boat, unsure what to do in the face of it. “Thank you.”

“Now, to the docks. The river is going to be lousy with guards. All that searching for the Little Empress, poor thing. So we’ll have to use the side-streets – that’s, uh , areas that used to be dry land until those levees broke when the plague was bad.” Samuel rubs a hand over his mouth, thoughtful. “The Flooded District is what they call the first one that went under, and that’s probably our fastest way there, but the Whalers have been awfully busy since Daud came back from the tower –”

Emily’s head snaps up. “Daud?” Her voice is as sharp as the sword she’s got her hands curled around, white-knuckled. “Did you say –”

Concern is bare on Samuel’s face; Emily does not care. “You know him?”

“I know what he did,” she says, flat. And her hand is so _tight_ around the hilt of her narrow sword.

(And the sword in her mind goes through her mother’s heart, red)

“Rumor is he’s done a lot of nasty stuff. Dabbles in black magic and things like that. I’m not going to ask which sin you’re referring to.” Samuel shifts and fusses with the rudder of the boat. He steers them past a crumbling brick wall that is heavy with posters, advertisements, announcements. There is a row of signs proclaiming the sins of a man known only as the Masked Felon, who’s face is known only as some kind of skull-shaped mask. It is a stupid name, she thinks. And a stupid illustration. Samuel clears his throat. “So as I said, I’ll steer clear of the Flooded District – ”

_“No.”_

It startles them both.

Samuel looks at her a long moment. He shuts off the motor and they drift there, in the silence. The water is calm. The rows of empty skull-eyes from the wanted posters on the wall stare down and do not judge. Samuel looks at her, and the sword, and up to the ceiling and the air and the skulls on the walls and the holes in the roof and the sun outside, and back to her. “You sure, Miss?”

Emily nods.

“I try not to make a habit of piloting young girls to certain death.”

“I understand, Samuel.” Her left hand curls tight over right, and both are curled around a blade. “It won’t be.”

(Or if it is, it will be better than a fall; better than plague; better than poison slipped in her breakfast glass; better than all of it. Better than _all_ of it.)

“He’s a trained killer,” he tries to tell her. “Got himself a gang, all in uniform, they all have black magic, rumor is it he’s got half the city in his pocket –”

“I know,” says Emily quietly, “what he is.”

He is the man who killed her mother and then had the monstrous gall to make her laugh and pretend that he was _honest._

Samuel nods, once. Studies the air and the water and the empty river around them, the white mist rolling in the distance like the mist in the Void. Studies her face. Studies it for a long time.

And when he starts the motor again, the roar feels (to Emily) as if it can shake the dust of years from the ceiling.

He turns them. He sets a course. They do not speak. Samuel pilots them past ruined warehouses and crumbling factories and slanting vacant apartment-building windows, all in silence. Takes them on a tour of the gutted insides of the city, the emptiness, the hollowed-out spaces where people used to live before the plague came and before the Regent’s fist closed tight around them. Before a sword shoved into the Empress and sent the world all spiraling down. The light of sunset is beautiful on the ruined buildings, and the ivy twines around them, and they list and lean on each other like lovers and Emily does not need to imagine hard to hear the weeping, always weeping.

He shows her all the parts of the city that Burrows would have never allowed her to see.

And he sews, quietly, while he does so, in the stretches where the way is straight and he does not need to turn – scraps of dark grey cloth that for all Emily can tell were going to be a scarf. His stitches are fast and very efficient. She does not ask what he is making, just as he has not asked her for her name.

 _So many who have travelled with him are now gone,_ the heart murmurs. _He has grown used to carrying death wherever he goes. You are not the first._

Emily strokes her fingers over the hilt of her sword, and strokes the fingers of her left hand up to trace the design half-hidden by her hair.

Dunwall is lost. Or, certainly, lost to her. The city and the Empire are as gutted and ruined and empty-shell wretched as all that Samuel has sailed them past, and even if Emily brought the Regent’s regime all crashing down in fire it would not fix that. But she can fix _this_. She can, she knows, (feeling out the threads of magic in the air like the white possibilities on a wide blank canvas) bend time and empty space to her will, take on the skins of miserable things, command all the forces of that which is wrong and broken and dark. She has a brand on her flesh. She has a blade. She has a purpose. And the man in the Flooded District has none – just _bitterness_ wrapped around him tight as his red coat. And the red of that coat is nearly as red as the Empress’s blood. She can finally stain it with his own. Set this one thing right. Do this one thing for her mother and _herself_. She can do this.

She does not realized that they have arrived until the boat knocks against the pier, motor cut, silence screaming in the air. He has slipped them past the perimeter set by the City Watch, and the only eyes who watch them here are _strange_.

“There,” says Samuel, voice hushed. He sounds tired. So very tired. He would have been old when she was a child; he looks so very, very old. He points – up in the shadows that are veiled with mist and green with the green of algae and years. She can see windows glittering high above. “That’s where he lives, near as people can tell. Watch out for his men. They all wear masks.”

( _I know,_ she wants to say _. I am used to men who wear false faces. I take tea with them every day_. _I am one of them.)_

Instead Emily only nods, once. She shucks his coat and lays it careful on the bench beside her – and stops when Samuel lays a soft hand on her shoulder.

“Hang on.” There is a note in his voice that wants to be a smile, if the _tired_ didn’t get in the way. “Little lady like you, you don’t want to go walking into a mess like that with everyone being able to see who you are, do you?”

He hands her what he has been sewing. It is a hood, she sees – a hood and a masking cloth for her face, to fit over her mouth just under her eyes. Dark and warm. She pulls it high and looks at her reflection in the river, face covered and shadowed, hair hidden, clothes dark and stained and sword naked in her hand: she looks like nothing she recognizes. She looks nothing like an Empress. Nor does she look, at all, like a little girl.

She merely _is._

“Thank you,” Emily murmurs. Muffled by cloth, taste of wool and salted seawater like tears. The urge to hug this man she’s barely met is sudden and ridiculous and _absurd_. She swallows down the lump in her throat, swallows hard as the boat begins to pull away. _“Thank you.”_

“Good luck.” Samuel tips his hat, again, throws her a salute. “You see that little Empress anywhere, you tell her to watch out for herself, will you?”

“I will!”

He smiles, once, blazing, brilliant. And then he is gone in the white mist. The thrum of the motor fades to a whisper and to nothing. His last repeated words of _good luck_ are merely a suggestion that hangs over the water; the _Emily_ that follows them is even less, probably just a trick of her mind.

*****

_Attention, Empress Emily Kaldwin: if you can hear this, know that your friends and advisors are terribly concerned for your safety. Please return at once. There will be no repercussions. The Empire is depending on you._

*****

She circles back.

She walks the streets and shadows of the Flooded District with her head down and her steps casual and shuffling, hood shrouding her face to turn away the gazes of the masked men high above. She makes herself look like an urchin or a beggar. Not a lost girl or a missing Empress to be stopped or captured or ransomed away; something that is not a threat. Something that is nothing at all, that merits no watching. She keeps the glittering windows of Daud’s lair on her left, always, turning back to it as if it is the sun. Spirals her way toward it.

And when it is high above and the sun is very low, she pulls herself up by her fingertips against a vent. And she begins to climb.

She takes a looping route along the rooftops, ever upward. It is like climbing the tower again. Searching for freedom.

Going upward assures her that she can see the Whalers before they see her and avoid their gaze, ducking into shadows as the blank glass eyes of their masks search her out. There are so many of them. Their masks are black and turn their faces into soft animal shapes, snouted and fish-eyed: but the only _monster_ , she knows, is the one who waits in the tower in a coat of blood-dark red and does not wear a mask at all.

Emily watches the Whalers as she had watched rats when she was young, as she’s watched the tactics and games of court for all of her young life. Her eyes are narrow beneath her hood. Carefully, carefully, she studies the way they shiver and vanish amidst the open air. It is a tactic used to confuse. Bewilder. Startle. Carefully, she copies it.

She finds that it is _thrilling._

She does not climb the broken rooftops and listing chimney-tops. She _flits._ She leaps through the empty air in the gaps that hold long and fatal falls (ten, fifteen, twenty gaping meters across), and she lands with a clatter of roof-tiles and her heart high in her throat; and when one such a clatter makes a gas-masked man whirl at his post, she simply slows the flow of life around her, slinks away in the hollows between the seconds and makes it so there’s nothing for him to see at all.

She wonders what Waverly would think if she could see her – wonders if a smile would light up the woman’s face, small and brilliant, if she would gasp and whisper _witchcraft!_ , if she would applaud. If she would be jealous, if she would be proud.

(Her mind _trips_ on the image, a bit, and she almost trips on a shingle as well, when Emily realizes that she should be asking such hypotheticals of her _mother_ )

( _When the other men do not say his name,_ says the heart, _he wonders if he has become a ghost._ _He wonders:_ _how did my face become this, how did I let it come to this?)_

She wonders, too, what Corvo would think if he could ever see her.

She wonders if he could ever have done this. Leap from roof to roof, hold a beautiful blade in hand, blaze, burn, seek vengeance.

He could have, she knows. He could do anything.

(Except dive for a closing prison door. Except survive a sword-slice through the neck. Except save her mother, save her from needing to do this, save her from all of it, _all_ of it.)

She can do anything, anything, anything.

The sun is low in the sky and level with the roof-top of the high-windowed room when she lands upon that roof, feet light as rat-paws on the shingles. She bends down low against the backdrop of the sunset so that her silhouette will not stand out against the reds and reds and _reds_ that shade the horizon.

(She looks at them, and that is all she sees. Red. She can taste it wet and heavy on her tongue.)

(A sunset seen off the deck of a ship could never be this beautiful. A sunset seen from distant Morely or Tyvia or Pandyssia or Serkonos could never be this _right_.)

Emily grips her blade that she has never used, and bends down low, and curls her small hands tight against the gutter-edge as she leans down to carefully peer into the top of the highmost window.

He is there.

And he is not alone.

Daud’s back is to her, and his coat is as red as red can be, and the light of the sunset glints red off the gas-mask eyes of the Whaler standing before him. Emily scrambles up a bit to be sure she won’t be seen.

“No sign of her, Sir,” the man is saying. Voice pinched and muffled behind his mask. “We sent a man down to talk to the witch –”

“That man won’t be back, you idiot.” Daud’s voice is muffled as well. Emily bites her lip, listens close.

“Sir, if I may ask – why are we looking for her?”

“Because if Burrows gets his hands back on her, she’s useless. Good as dead.”

“Well, yes, Sir, but – why do we care?”

Daud shoves his hands deep into his pockets, sighs a sigh that shakes his frame. He turns (Emily keeps very still, scrupulously still). She watches him stare out the window at the red red _red_ of the setting sun.

At least, she thinks he does.

It is difficult to tell.

The mask that covers his face is metal, not rubber; and unlike those of the lesser Whalers it does not turn him into a monster. It turns him into a skeleton. A thing that used to be a man but is now stripped down, all bitterness, brittle hard lines and hollow spaces between bones where there once was heart.

The eyes of the skull-shaped mask do not reflect the light of the sun.

They reflect nothing at all.

“We care,” says Daud (and the mouth of the skull does not move, the mouth of the skull is dead), “because I say we do. Dismissed.”

“But Sir -!”

 _“Dismissed._ Tell all the men to go home for the night. You’re all dismissed. _”_

And the man leaves.

And the two of them are alone, truly alone.

Emily bites her lip, hard. Tastes blood. Tastes blood in her mouth again, her mother’s blood hanging on the air, and the iron that fills her mouth and thrums through her veins is a righteous religious sort of _rage_. She counts the seconds until the murderer shows her his back. She touches the heart in her pocket to fill them, listens what it has to say.

 _Why are we here?_ it asks. _What are you doing here? We should both be far away!_

There is such pain in the heart’s voice, such _panic_ , raw and torn as the empty space where a body once was whole. Emily hesitates. Almost – _almost –_

But then Daud turns. His back is to her. His hands are loose and empty on the table and his head is down and he is unseeing, unknowing as her mother was those years ago. The jolt that goes down her spine is hot and red and the mark on her skin flares bright as fire in answer, and the glass of the window shatters inward with a sound like the world breaking. And she follows it. And she leaps _down_.

*****

_In light of the absence of Emily Kaldwin, Empress of us all, your Lord Regent will continue to govern until another solution can be found._

*****

It is surprise, only.

That does not make it any lesser, or any less sweet.

She kicks him down, strikes his hand away when he goes to draw his sword. Slices through his glove. The hint of blood on the tip of her blade is sudden and bright. The jolt that goes through her at the sight is half thrill and half pure _shock_ , but she has no time for that – she is not some green little girl – there is _vengeance_ in her hands and a murderer standing before her and she is done with _waiting_. Emily calls another gust of wind that forces him back, against the wall, _down_ , and before he can move or fight or blink or summon darkness back to devour her alive she is upon him. Narrow frame upon his chest to pin him down. Hand splayed against his throat. Blade just above the hand, flush against the pulse in his neck. Her face is not a breath away from his mask, and the mask is expressionless and cold, so she reaches up and rips it off.

The window is broken and the splinters of glass lie all around them, sharp shards of mirror. And they both freeze like that in the middle of them. Gasping. Eye to human eye.

Just like that.

No masks. None at all.

“Empress,” Daud manages, after a long while. His voice is a rasp, pained, breathless on the edges, hinting at breathless laughter. He swallows hard and winces when the blade scrapes against his skin. “Well? You’ve probably got a whole speech planned out, so say it.”

“Shut up,” Emily snaps. She searches for words, finds none. “I didn’t give you leave to speak.”

“And your mother didn’t _give me leave_ to kill her either. But here we are.”

_“Shut up.”_

His eyes flick to her sword. Down and back up. “I’m not going to ask how you got past my men. You’re another one of the Outsider’s little playthings. Like me. Special. They’ve only got a shadow of what we can do. But I will ask – have you ever killed anyone?”

“Yes.”

(If she thinks back, she does not even remember swinging the board. The _decision_ of swinging the board. She just remembers the impact jarring up her arm, and the woman falling, and the eye oozing down her cheek. The sound of the rats ripping her corpse to bloody rags.)

 _No_ , shrieks the heart in her pocket. Tears tearing at its voice. _No, no, no!_

If Daud thinks she’s lying, his eyes do not show it. They show nothing. They are not even mirrors; there is something empty there, hollowed-out as the space between ribs. She watches the way his lips twitch into the barest hint of a smirk. “Doesn’t feel good, does it?”

_“Shut -!”_

“So cut my throat and be done with it, little _Empress_.” He shifts and Emily’s face _twists_ and she holds him down, gives him no space to move at all. “Avenge your lovely mother. Or whatever you’re here to do.  Make your speech. Tell me how I’m scum. Tell me what I _did to you_.” The smile he gives her has more in common with the ghoulish grin of his mask than with anything _human_ , and it has no artifice at all. “I can tell you what it felt like, if that helps. I can tell you how I didn’t even look her in the eye.”

And Daud may not have looked Jessamine in the eye, but Emily looks in his. Looks him straight in the eye (her hood pulled down to show her face, his metal mask all torn away) and holds his empty gaze as she gets off him. She keeps the sword held light against his throat, the line of her arm extended, just that little sharp point against his skin tethering him to her will as she stands above him. “Tell.”

He does.

If Emily closes her eyes it will be all the freedom he needs to escape, to call for his Whalers, to seal her fate. If she closes her eyes she will see what he describes, perfectly. The spray of red. The efficient lines of his arm. The way he’d held her mother like she was a doll or a thing and had not looked at her, indeed, looked _through_ her as if she was something to be conquered or something to be used. As if she were only what Waverly has spoken of. Only a prize or a tool.

Emily only realizes that her hands are shaking when Daud stops speaking with a curse, _flinches_ , dabs at the line of red trickling down the collar of his coat.

“Why did you do it?” she asks. Voice sharp as that cut. “I know Burrows paid you. That doesn’t _count_. Why did you do it?”

“Ha. Why does anyone kill something beautiful? I was _selfish_.”

It is the first time he has looked away, and Emily bites her lip until she tastes _red_ and makes him look _back_. “You have no right to call her beautiful,” she snarls. “You _murdered_ her, you haven’t a _right_ to even –”

“I wasn’t talking about your precious _mother_ , Emily.” The sound of her name freezes her. He makes a sound when the sword presses under his chin and presses his head back, and the next time he speaks his voice has a measure of control. “I meant the city. The Empire. This.” His eyes flick out the windows to the grey and flood and decay around them. “No man should be responsible for… _this_.”

“You’ve been talking like you _want_ me to kill you,” she replies. There is something sick curling in the pit of her stomach. This is not how she imagined this; this was _never_ how she imagined this, and the heart in her pocket hisses of _ruin_ and _the_ _feel of being torn apart to pieces in a game_ , of _things that cannot be forgiven._ “W-well? Do you?”

“No.”

It is such a short word.

Daud gets to his feet, slowly. Eyes fixed on hers. Her sword fixed to the hollow of his throat. It reminds her of a way a rat will freeze and dare to move and not break the gaze of a cat that seeks it out (her hand is sweat-slick on the sword and the _blank_ in his face is for once not a mask at all, and she is not sure which of them is which). He stands still like that, against the wall. His hands are at his sides.

It occurs to her that she could and _should_ be dead many times over. If he cared to kill her. If he had tried at all.

“No,” says Daud, and the word is just that. Simple and short. Empty of anything else.

“You’re lying.”

“I’ve never lied to you.” His throat works again, heedless of the way it scrapes her sword, and the sword moves, and that is a line connecting them, too. “I know I deserve it.”

 _Yes,_ whispers the heart, sinuous, bitter. _The skull he wears on his face is his true self. He is worth nothing but death. Yes._

“Yes,” says Emily. “You do.”

“It’s not just your mother I killed when I shoved that sword into her. So go on, little Empress.” The breath he takes is shaky on the edges. She can feel it in her arm, upon her skin. “Avenge your precious Empire. _Fix_ everything.”

“Killing you won’t fix a damn thing.”

“… _Smart_ girl.”

Daud _hisses_ as the sword flicks up and dances over his face, draws a line down the side in parallel to the scar he already bears. The line is shaky as those of Emily’s early paintings. It is as fine as a thread, and she watches red bead to the surface under the press of his black-gloved fingers and trickle down. _“Shit -!”_

And Emily snaps her wrist and the sword folds away as if it was never there at all.

They stare each other down. Her face is pale and her hands are shaking, _shaking_ , and the blood makes a soft not-sound as it soaks into the fabric of Daud’s collar and colors it only a deeper red. The smell of it is sharp upon the air. So familiar. And there are so many words on  her tongue again, brilliant, all the things that she wants to say.

 _You murdered my mother,_ she would begin. The scream would break and beat upon the air and rouse the Whalers from their beds, surely; if she screamed it would be the death of her. It would rip her to shreds as surely as if she were torn apart by the teeth of rats. _Her and Corvo and those two women in the Wrenhaven and the men who came to rescue me and everyone else, everyone, all those stupid dolls I threw into the sea, they’re all dead because of you – !_

(And she is wrong, she who is usually so good at spying out the truth, she knows that she is ever so wrong –)

_You brought this entire Empire crashing down in flames, it’s already happened, if I sail away on a ship to Serkonos or Pandyissia and vanish for ever and ever and turn around to see the city burning it won’t be because I left it here to die; it’s been burning all around while I’ve done nothing and it will be because of **you** –_

(Wrong, so utterly wrong –)

( _There are betrayals that cannot be forgiven_ , snarls the heart. _There are men who see the world in black in white, in order and chaos only, who consume all that they touch like creatures from the deep who are all mouths and who deserve no mercy.)_

 _And if I killed you to avenge my **mother** , _Emily thinks, fierce and bright and hands clenched tight, _it would not be enough._

_And if I killed you and then turned on my heel and took ship and turned back to watch the city burn, nothing will have changed, and it will all be the same._

_And if I kill you to avenge this city and this Empire, that would require that I actually **care**._

(She thinks of the wreck and ruin all around her, the things that Samuel has shown her and that she has seen, the sunlight filtering golden through the beams of a flooded building through which they had sailed like a dream. And she does, she does.)

 _(He has been hiding for years_ , snarls the heart. _He has been running and hiding as surely as if he drove a ship into the sea. It is time for it to **stop**.)_

 _“_ I was going to take a ship away from here,” says Emily. Her voice is low and ragged at the edges, as broken as the walls of this city. “After I killed you I was going to take a ship, and I was going to run away. That’s what _you’ve_ been doing, isn’t it? Running.”

Daud’s eyes flicker and his face goes hard for a second, then masked. She sees him bite down on the _no_. “If you like.”

“You said you wouldn’t lie to me.”

This is not strictly true; it is _I’ve never_ that he’d said, not _I never will_ , and she realizes too late that she has paved a future with her tongue.

Daud sighs, heavy. Pulls a gloved hand away from his face and grimaces at the blood there, grimaces more when the motion pulls at the fresh cut across his cheek that is not a fingerbreadth away from the old. “You’re the Empress, Emily,” he manages. “If it makes you feel better than me and gives you what you need to sleep at night, I’ll say whatever you like.”

Emily shakes her head. She steps forward, careful, breaks his gaze long enough to bend down amidst the broken glass on the floor and pick up his skull of a mask from where she had thrown it away. The mouth grins up at her. Smiling out of the years and out of the dark. She runs her fingers over the ice-cold metal as she speaks, feeling the way it is slightly too large for her face but will probably fit for a while just the same. “No,” she murmurs. The words taste hollow and sick. They also taste _true_. “I have never been an Empress. And if I’m –“

She swallows, hard.

The mask slides over her face like skin.

When she sees her reflection in the scattered shards of mirror upon the floor she looks nothing like she knows. Now more than ever. Not a little girl. Certainly no Empress. She is herself, herself, only herself.

( _It was not,_ a letter from the man who made this mask would say if she could find it _, intended for you –_ but she is done with looking back and she is done with doing things _for_ , being things _for_ )

 “I’ve never been an Empress,” says Emily. Her voice resonates inside the mask, a bit, comes out through the teeth and hangs upon the air. “I’ve never been _anything_. And you’re not the man I need to kill to fix that.”

*****

_Attention, Officers of the Watch: Patrols will be doubled in and around the area of Dunwall Tower. We are suspicious that the Empress may grow bored of her rebellion and return. Be vigilant._

*****

Emily laughs when she hears the announcement, and it echoes in the hollow of the mask.

( _You need this_ , Daud had said. He’d pressed it back into her hands, heedless of the way the blood from his own had smeared across the cheek. _You don’t want to be captured, and they’ll kill me whether I show my face or not. You need this more than me_.)

She crouches upon the rooftop across the gate of Dunwall Tower. It is late at night. She can see familiar carriages and armored cars parked within the courtyard; Sokolov is there, and the Ladies Boyle as well, likely to keep Burrows from raging tooth and nail.

The sky is dark and the sea is dark and the cobblestones are darker still, and the tower rises like a white beacon in the night. The guards who move on those dark cobbles far below are dark and thickly-clumped as swarms of rats. They carry torches. The firelight is hungry; it is the closest to seeing Dunwall burning that she will likely ever see.

(If she _were_ to see Dunwall burning, Emily has decided, it would mean that all the men who sought to play her as predictably as the strings of a harpsichord had _won_ )

The torches are bright. They blind the men below her. They make them look only inside the circle of light and no farther – and, as ever, not a one of them truly ever looks _up_.

Emily climbs and scuttles and sneaks her way until she is atop the white gate of Dunwall Tower and then it is only the moat before her, twenty meters across, a long impossible fall down into nothingness. She pauses, there. Catches her breath.

She is alone.

She could go back. But she would have rather marched with head uncovered and high straight into the Flooded District to meet her death than even think of going _back_.

She can see the Tower spread below her, familiar as ever. The only world she had been allowed to know. Daud had tried to show her a map of it with entrances and vantage points mapped out in scrawling script once she’d told him what she meant to do, but Emily had only laughed. She knows this place well enough that it will be like infiltrating her own skin. She’d laughed, as well, when he’d traced the long route she intended to take with a gloved and blood-glazed fingertip, asked if she wanted him _with_ her.

 _Void, no,_ she’d said. Hands on her bony hips. _Just because I let you live for now, you think I **trust** you? How do you know you won’t knife me in the back?_

_You don’t. You do._

_I don’t need you. I don’t need anyone._

She doesn’t.

The thought is a secret thrill down her spine. Up and down, sparking in the mark at the nape of her neck. And Emily steps forward, exulting, into the empty air, into the long and fatal fall into nothingness and into _forward_ – and she steps back into being on the other side, perched precariously on the edge of the tower but not falling. Never falling. She catches her balance herself. And the _yes!_ that she whispers is echoed inside her mask, echoed by the heart under her fingers, echoes softly up the walls of the tower until it seems (to her) to drown all bells and announcements and _lies_ from the soft night air.

*****

_Trust in your Lord Regent. Trust in the Empire. Please, trust in us._

*****

In the hours before she left, at her insistence and swordpoint, Daud had taught her a Tyvian choke-hold. When she uses it on the guard outside of the Regent’s office she finds that it is not as clean as she imagined. Not as quick. Her hands are small and the noises he makes are animal, ugly, but after what seems like ages he slumps to the floor. And her sword is still folded at her side.

If she is going to kill, Emily thinks (as she thought at the Cat those years ago),she is going to kill those who deserve it.

She has learned many secrets in her time spent creeping through the tower, and the combination to the Lord Regent’s safe is one she’s known for years and years. She knows, also, that it contains documents that Burrows will never allow her to see. Records. Impartial _proof_.

It swings open at a touch. Barely a whisper of noise – and it is empty, so empty, nothing at all.

And the click of a pistol behind her is _loud._

Emily turns.

“What were you looking for?” Burrows demands. He is alone. His face is drawn and pale. Hard. The ornate and gilded pistol does not sit well in his hand. “Gold? State secrets? Some kind of idiotic _confession?_ ” His eyes narrow, seek out hers behind the skull. “Who in the Void do you think you _are?”_

Emily says nothing. Her hands are loose upon her sword, not daring to flick it open with the nose of the pistol so close to her face. She watches. And the pistol _wavers_ , and the Regent’s shout of _guards!_ is loud on the air –

And it is answered by a distant alarm, _below_ the Regent’s office, in the marble entryway of the tower where she’d seen the Executioner bleed out upon the floor not even a week before. Sound of shouting, a stampede of frantic feet. “Guards,” Burrows shrieks, and still the pistol does not fire, “ _kill_ this bastard, for the love of - !”

Only three of them burst through the door – and the bullets burst upon the cabinetry behind her in an explosion of splintered wood and shattered ricocheting glass, because Emily is no longer _there_. She steps out of the air behind Burrows and loops an arm around his throat, half-chokes him, Waverly’s small knife held against his neck and keeping him from freeing himself as she drags him away, as the guards look around in confusion and reload, as the sound from the entryway below grows to an echoing storm of screams.

She cannot run with Burrows held so. And so she _blinks_ : appears and reappears as bullets whine in the air around her, out the door and down the hall of the tower. She expects the walls to break apart with bullets each time she reappears but they do not; she expects a dozen guards to catch her arms and rip her mask from her and rip it _all_ from her and they do not. Almost no one tries to stop her. And when she is halfway across the hall, she dares look down, and she sees why.

The floors of the marble entryway to Dunwall Tower are slick with a thin film of blood, and the guards die and thicken it even as she watches. And sometimes what they fight is a swarm of rats, all of them white, roiling and devouring; and sometimes what they fight is a man in a heart-red coat who flickers in and out of the air between them, sword a too-fast blur as he breaks the very walls of time. They are guards, they are only men, they do not look up to see her hauling the Lord Regent away; they look only toward _this_ , the red upon the empty white floor.

 _(I don’t need you,_ she’d said. Cold. Chin high. _But you’ve been running, and you’re being childish and **stupid** , and I swear on the mark we both bear that I’ll run you through right **now** if you don’t decide to **stop**_.)

Emily smacks the pillar of one of the last remaining Arc Reactors left in the city and hauls Burrows through the door. The blue light dances harmless around them both as she blinks him up the stairs, up and up and _up_. The screams of the guards who tried to follow are crisp and fringed with the buzzing sound of electricity ripping them apart. She pays no attention.

The announcer has gone to bed, and so she tips Burrows hard into his chair and rips off her mask.

No masks for them. At long last. Not now. Not for this.

“Emily.” His eyes are wide. The hand he raises to brush away the point of her sword is shaking, so badly, and it only shakes the harder when the sword does not move and his fingers only come away red. “I – _no_ \- what do you –?!”

“You said something,” she asks, voice empty, “about a confession?”

Burrows stares at her. Stares and stares. He licks his lips. The sound of the tower around them is loud, and the air is thick with so many things – the screaming of the guards and the distant screaming of civilians as they are hurried away, smell of blood and piss, the weight of years and years of lies. None of that, now, is important. His voice is reedy but it cuts through it all. “Emily,” he pleads, “you have to understand – if you thought I was going to kill you, don’t be stupid – I am not _stupid_ , I’ve only done what’s best –!”

The Lord Regent is a small and thin and pathetic man, and fear makes him naked before her. And Emily can see that some of what  he says is false and some of that is true. But that is not why she is here at all.

“Stop,” she orders, “ _lying_.”

She reaches up to flip a switch. And the PA system flares to life.

******

_Attention, citizens of Dunwall and the Empire. This is your Empress. Emily Kaldwin. I’m safe and better than ever. But I believe your Lord Regent has a few things he wants to say._

******

The mark on the back of Emily’s neck sings and crackles as she descends the stairs. The sounds from above – the shrieking, the ripping scuttling sounds of summoned plague-rats tearing into flesh – these are distant by the time she reaches the bottom. Faint. But the thrill dancing all down her spine is stronger than ever.

This, finally, is what power must feel like.

The former Lord Regent’s confession still hangs upon the midnight air. It’s stopped all motion in the tower; it has likely stopped all motion in the city, and soon the Empire itself. It is not a small thing when a man confesses to murdering an Empress. To concocting a plague. To keeping an Empress trained at heel and keeping it all for himself.

(Burrows had not mentioned the name _Daud_. Nor had he mentioned plans to kill Emily on her sixteenth birthday or poison her that night. One is due to the sword at his throat; the other, she could see, was true. He was not stupid, after all; or, at least, not in this. The fact did not merit a shred of mercy at all.)

When Emily steps out into the halls of Dunwall Tower, she feels every eye turn towards her, and she knows that she is finally _seen_.

Everyone is still. The battle below has stopped in the face of the confession in the sky. Daud is on the ground, a boot to his back, the swords and pistols of a dozen guards all pointed to his face. The Regent’s confession had stretched on for long enough that he’s had time to catch his breath, but he’s bleeding heavily, Emily can see – there are slashes darkening the red of his coat and a shrapnel-graze high on his shoulder that’s turned the fabric and the flesh beneath all to ribbons, and the faces of the guards who are turned toward him speak of _murder_.

The answer to why he’s not already dead lies in the face of Waverly Boyle. The woman is pale and hard and triumphant, and she cares nothing for the looks the Watch-Captain on duty is giving her. She nods to Emily, once. Small smile. “I thought, Empress,” she says, “that this man should be up to you.”

Emily returns the nod, but not the smile.

It is an odd feeling, to walk down the stairs of the tower that’s been her home and prison for so long with every eye upon her and stand before her mother’s murderer. The men and women around her have no idea what to expect, and she is not playing a role for any of them. She owes them nothing at all.

And the man before her owes her everything.

The mask in her fingers is cold, and it drops from her hands with a sound like something breaking. The heart in her pocket is sluggish, and her fingers slide from its surface and hang empty at her side. Emily bends to one knee on the floor, looks Daud in the eye as the guard lets him up enough for him to scramble to his hands and knees. His eyes are down.

“That ship you wanted to take,” he murmurs, and his voice is a pained rasp, “to Serkonos. Or wherever. If you let me live, I’ll take it. Go on. Say you never want to see me again.”

Emily feels her lips twitched up into a crooked smile.

“No,” she says. “You’re not going to tell me what to say.” She looks up and catches the Watch-Captain’s eye. “Send a man to the Abbey. To everywhere in the city. Ring the bells.”

“Empress, it’s after midnight –”

 _Empress_ , she thinks. _Yes, indeed. Yes._

“I know. I don’t care.” Emily stands. Her chin is high as she has been taught, and her voice is the voice of an Empress, or a little girl, or both, or none; it does not matter. _It does not matter_. It is only hers. “They’ve rung for  my mother and Corvo and Burrows. They are damn well going to ring for me.”

They do.

*****

_Long live Empress Emily Kaldwin the First. Long live the Empire._

*****

This is what is taken as true:

It is said of Empress Jessamine Kaldwin that she was pure and merciful and good, that she had too much innocence, too much heart. It is said of Corvo Attano that he hid murder behind a false face, that he was selfish or cruel, that he knew no mercy at all. The last is only said behind closed doors in the dark places of the city, for even after the records are cleared rumors die far more slowly than Empresses; but that does not make it any less true.

It is said of Daud, Lord Protector to young Emily, that he has forged guilt for sins of the past into a bright and brittle shield for her. It is said of Waverly Boyle, her chief advisor, that she hides a blade behind her back and hides whatever heart she has behind layers of careful smiles.

Propaganda, Emily knows, is never strictly true. Men wear more masks than what the wanted posters may suggest. And when they peel these masks away in the dark along with their clothes and their lies, she knows, this does not mean they have less to hide. It is a game she’s played since childhood. As she’s been taught. She plays it very well.

And so this is what is true:

It is said of Emily Kaldwin that she rose from fire and flood and paid betrayal with betrayal; that her hand is gentler, at least, than the hands of the men she replaced, a lady’s gloves over the hilt of a sword.

That she is kind and she is cruel in equal measure, and that both are warranted, and that she wields both only for herself. It is said, often, that she has her mother’s heart and her father’s face.

And it is said that when the announcer speaks, now, or the bells ring out over the city, it is only at her order. The power of truth and lie is hers, and only hers. At long, long last.


End file.
